It was at dawn on Saturday, October 7, when a loud explosion sounded in Al Bat, a Bedouin village unrecognized by authorities in Israel’s Negev Desert. Akel Kran, 46, said he went with other neighbors to check whether the sheep had been damaged. Everything OK. Since it was not the first time that rockets arrived from Gaza, around 50 kilometers away, they continued their tasks. Normal. None of those present knew that at this point, Hamas was not only firing rockets, as it often does, but also carrying out the major ground attack that left about 1,200 people dead and triggered the current war.
Minutes after the aforementioned impact, around seven in the morning, another explosion occurred in Al Bat, barely more than a handful of houses and huts scattered across a rocky area, reflecting the harsh reality under which the Bedouins live in Israel , well reflected. This had an impact on the Sheq, the meeting place for the men of the community. The prefabricated aluminum room jumped into the air, explains Kran with a gentle voice and a calm facial expression. There were four children inside: brothers Jawad and Malik, aged 12 and 15; Amin, 10, and Mohammad, 15, with an adult. Taleb, 37 years old and Kran’s brother, was injured and was still in the hospital more than three weeks later. The four minors died. The two brothers in the act. The other two, on the way to the hospital. Amin was one of the nine sons of Akel Kran.
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These children are among the group of 18 Bedouins who lost their lives on October 7, seven in rocket fire and 11 in a ground attack by Islamic radicals. The group of around 240 people who were kidnapped to Gaza also included six hostages. The war is a reminder of the traditional institutional forgetfulness of the Bedouin community. “In these cities we are not protected by the Iron Dome (air defense system) because it is an unrecognized area. “We also don’t have ambulances, shelters, alarm systems…” regrets Kran, barely changing his gesture as he sips a paper cup of coffee. The man tries to describe the situation in which he still lives, 75 years after Israel’s existence, an important part of his community.
A resident of Al Bat, a Bedouin village unrecognized by Israel, stands next to a concrete pipe used as a bomb shelter, installed after a rocket fired by Hamas killed four children on the morning of October 7. Luis De Vega HernandezSolar panels on a house in Makhul, a Bedouin village in the Negev Desert that, like the rest of the villages, lacks basic services, up to 37 in this community that Israel does not recognize. Luis De Vega HernandezA boy from Makhul, a Bedouin village unrecognized by Israel, next to the remains of a tin house that was hit by a Hamas rocket without causing casualties.Luis De Vega HernándezYoung resident of Makhul who has no street, no school, no health center, no protection from the Hamas rocket attacks that have hit this city in recent weeks.Luis De Vega HernándezA neighbor next to the place where his house was until a few days ago, in Makhul, a Bedouin village in southern Israel, where a Hamas rocket hit. Luis De Vega HernandezA resident of Al Bat checks his cell phone in one of the rooms used by the men of this Bedouin community, which is not recognized by Israel.Luis De Vega HernándezA child in Al Bat, a Bedouin town that does not recognize Israel and is not allowed to officially build or have an address, even though residents are Israeli citizens. Luis De Vega HernandezResidents of Al Bat next to one of the tanks from which they draw water, as this and the other unrecognized cities do not have essential services and supplies. Luis De Vega HernandezA neighbor in a tent in Makhul, a Bedouin town unrecognized by Israel in the Negev Desert where the majority of the community’s more than 300,000 members live. Luis De Vega Hernandez
In the first hours of October 7 alone, the Islamist militia fired around 3,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, according to the army last week. Most were intercepted. During the last Gaza war in 2014, 4,000 rockets were fired in 50 days. Al Bat, which covers an area of about 400 residents, is one of the 37 cities that Israeli authorities consider illegal, which do not exist on the map and are therefore not equipped with basic necessities. There is no road there. They have everything outside: school, health, market, work, services… And in times of war like the current one, unlike other Israelis, they have no shelters to protect themselves from rockets or safe rooms in their homes if necessary. you can call it that.
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In Makhul, another village with rows of tin houses that looked like huts, some children played next to the piled metal materials that made up one of the houses until another projectile from Gaza destroyed it without causing any casualties. At dusk, the muezzin’s call to prayer from the mosque competes with the roar of the warplanes bombing the Strip, which have killed more than 11,000 people there.
The Adalah organization, which fights for the rights of the Israeli Arab community, denounced on October 30 the authorities’ “systematic discrimination and neglect of the state” due to the lack of housing in the majority of recognized and unrecognized Bedouin villages. Anti-aircraft or other protected areas. The complaint also refers to thousands of children from this community whose lives are “at risk” because they have to attend classes without the protections in place in other parts of the country. “The Bedouin land is gold for Israel,” says Marwan Abu Frieh, coordinator of Adalah in the Negev, a desert they call the Naqab in Arabic.
He believes that the Israeli state is not ignoring the Bedouins, but is trying to destroy their way of life, their traditions, their culture and the places where they have settled for centuries. “The government insists on relocating them, evicting them from their land and relocating them, and does not offer them any solutions because that would mean that they would officially assume that they can stay where they have lived all their lives . We have to constantly appeal to the courts,” warns the Adalah coordinator in the Negev. According to him, due to the lack of accommodation, only seven of the 13 small health centers in the area are functioning.
Together with other organizations, they are trying to close the security vacuum created by the war and set up shelters in the villages. Jaled Eldada is one of the volunteers who placed hundreds of them on a truck with a crane in the second half of October. Two arrived in Al Bat. A group of camels grazes around one of them. It is a simple concrete tube that is estimated to fit around twenty people.
Half of Israel’s Bedouin population lives in these illegal villages with no right to build a house, no infrastructure, no running water, no electricity, no sewage system, no education or minimal health services, criticizes Yelaa Raanan of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Peoples. They live under constant threat of their homes being demolished in places where there is no transportation, he adds. In addition, approximately 5,000 children do not have access to daycare, although it is mandatory for Israeli citizens. “They are the poorest,” Raanan concludes, emphasizing that these hundred shelters represent less than 10% of the need.
“It is very difficult to be a good student under these conditions,” said Suleiman Kamalat, director of the school in Rahat, the largest Bedouin town, where Jawad attended fifth grade until a Hamas rocket killed him on October 7. The screen displays the classification of the best files, including yours. Several children from Al Bat show the reporter on their cell phones portraits of the four colleagues they lost that day and photos of the collective funeral on their cell phones while walking through the city.
The Bedouin population of Palestinian origin in Israel’s Negev today is around 310,000 people, descendants of those who lived in this desert area when the State of Israel was founded in 1948. Of these, around 80,000 live in 37 settlements without official recognition; another 35,000 in 11 localities recognized at the beginning of this century but which still do not have the necessary services, and the rest, about 195,000, in seven municipalities created by the authorities between 1969 and 1989. Two-thirds of the Bedouin community are among the 20% of the Israeli Arab population who live below the poverty line in the Negev, a rate three times the national average.
Several activists meet at a community compound in Hura, one of the recognized Bedouin towns. They are convinced that the moment is a catastrophe not only because of the conflict, but also because the government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will do nothing for them. One of those present is Ezry Keydar, director of the Israeli NGO Keshet, which has been fighting for years for the recognition of the Bedouin community and for the preservation of their culture and ancestral way of life. The moment Marwan Abu Frieh, a Bedouin, takes the opportunity to say goodbye and gets into his SUV, Keydar laughs at him in a friendly manner and tries to show that he no longer has the pedigree of a desert man: “A Bedouin Being is not an origin, it is a way of life.”
Children in the city of Makhul in southern Israel, where various humanitarian organizations denounce the authorities’ neglect as they seek to separate the Bedouin community from their traditional way of life in the desert. Luis De Vega Hernandez
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