Jerusalem, May 8 (EFE).- At least 80 homes were demolished this Wednesday in the Bedouin village of Wadi al Jalil, near the town of Umm al Batin in the Negev desert, southern Israel, in an Israeli operation in which 320 residents have been expelled, half of them children, as Nati Yefet, spokesperson for the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages of the Negev, confirmed to EFE.
“Hundreds of residents, children and the elderly, are being evacuated from their homes by an (Israeli) government that insists on trampling and forcibly harming the Bedouin society of the Negev,” denounced the representative of the Negev on the United Arab List, Waleed. Alhwashla on your X account.
Likewise, Yefet indicated that the Israeli authorities destroyed the village mosque, farms and other structures in an operation that began at eight in the morning with bulldozers and a hundred police officers. During the demolitions, one person was arrested.
The Israeli government is forcing residents of Wadi al Jalil to move to Umm al Batin, where they are not welcome and face threats, due to the expansion of Highway 6 to the south, Yefet explained.
“These people have nowhere to go, and some neighbors are still in the village in a state of shock. Some are thinking about sleeping in the tents they set up last night,” lamented the spokesperson, who considered that this situation would be unthinkable if the neighbors were Jews.
“Israel wants to decide where people who are not Jewish have to live,” Yefet said.
This same organization had already denounced this Tuesday that this demolition is the largest carried out in a single day against homes since 2010 and that it was promoted by the Minister of National Security, the far-right and settler Itamar Ben Gvir, and by the Minister of the Diaspora, Amichai Chikli.
“Its objective is to ignite the Negev to deepen racial discrimination. This is a serious violation of the human rights of hundreds of people,” they said in a press release.
Israel does not recognize some 37 Bedouin, Arab and semi-nomadic communities, in which some 80,000 people live, and many like Wadi al Jalil have faced demolition and expulsion orders and “exorbitant fines” for years, according to the NGO Machsom Watch.
The Israeli State seeks that the more than 300,0000 Bedouins who have lived in its territory for hundreds of years, long before the establishment of the State in 1948, give up their agricultural jobs to live in the small and impoverished urban areas that it has granted them.
In 2002, demolitions of Bedouin structures increased to 2,580, according to the NGO Negev Coexistence Forum (NCF).
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