Description

Photo:
Scene. Published by Maan News
_____

NEGEV (Ma’an) -- Israeli authorities demolished the home of a Bedouin man for the tenth time in the span of two years in the Bedouin town of Tel al-Sabi in southern Israel on Thursday, locals said.

Locals told Ma’an that Israeli bulldozers escorted by the Yoav unit of the Israeli police entered the town, located in the Negev desert, on Thursday morning and prevented residents from approaching the area to remove belongings from the home targeted for demolition.

They added that it was the sixth time since the beginning of 2017 and the tenth time in the span of two years that Israeli authorities had demolished a home belonging to Salman Abu Sabila.

Bedouin communities in the Negev have been the target of a heightened demolition campaign since the beginning of the year, with one demolition raid turning deadly, following Israeli leaders publicly expressing their commitment to demolish Palestinian structures lacking difficult to obtain Israeli-issued building permits across Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, in response to the Israeli-court sanctioned evacuation of the illegal Amona settler outpost.

Palestinian communities in Israel are often forced to build without Israeli-issued building permits, due to what rights groups have attributed to discriminatory zoning policies in Israel which have excluded many Palestinian-Israeli communities from being included in the regional and municipal development plans.

According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), more than half of the approximately 160,000 Negev Bedouins reside in unrecognized villages.

The Bedouin village of al-Araqib has notably been demolished 112 times since 2010.

Rights groups have claimed that the demolitions in Bedouin villages is a central Israeli policy aimed at removing the indigenous Palestinian population from the Negev and transferring them to government-zoned townships to make room for the expansion of Jewish Israeli communities.