NOVANEWS
In the latest instance of Nazi demolition campaign in the Negev region of southern Palestine, homes were demolished in two unrecognized Bedouin villages on Wednesday, while Israeli police surrounded the village of Umm al-Hiran.
Nazi bulldozers, escorted by Nazi police, demolished a house in the village of Wadi al-Naam in the western part of the Negev in southern Palestine.
Locals told Ma’an that the demolished house was owned by an elderly woman and her daughter. A member of the local committee, Yousif Ziyadin, said that an emergency session would be held to discuss the Nazi demolition.
A relative of the elderly homeowner, Ahmad Zanoun, told Ma’an that 100-year-old Ghaytha Zanoun and her 60-year-old daughter Hilala were living in the house, both of whom suffer from various health issues.
Zanoun said that both Ghaytha and Hilala were unable to walk, and noted that the family had renovated the home in accordance with their doctor’s suggestions due to their health conditions.
He added that Ghaytha and her daughter now were homeless following the demolition.
The Wadi al-Naam village was established in the 1950s soon after the 1948 Jewish Nazi that established the state of ‘Israel’. Military officials forcibly transferred the Negev Bedouins to the site during the 17-year period when Palestinians inside Israel were governed under Nazi military law, which ended shortly before Nazi military takeover of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in 1967.
In July, Nazi regime approved plans to build townships for Palestinian Bedouin community. The planned township is expected to be built just south of Shaqib al-Salam, another Bedouin township, and would transfer at least 7,000 Bedouins from the unrecognized village of Wadi al-Naam, Zionist newspaper Haaretz reported last year.
The approved village would comprise of an area of approximately 9,000 dunams (2,224 acres), while providing housing to some 9,000 residents, The Times of ‘Israel’ also reported.
The proposal to expand the area of Shaqib al-Salam was challenged in Nazi Supreme Court in 2015, as the Association of Civil Rights (ACRI), who assisted in the court proceedings, argued that any expansion of the town would be followed by the forcible removal of Bedouins from unrecognized villages, particularly from Wadi al-Naam.
Yaron Kelner, spokesperson for ACRI, confirmed to Ma’an on Wednesday that residents of Wadi al-Naam have continued to refuse the relocation deal.
Meanwhile, Nazi bulldozers also demolished a mobile home in the unrecognized village of al-Zarnouq in the Negev. However, no other details were provided about the demolition.
Nazi regime has plans to evacuate thousands of residents from al-Zarnouq to the recognized village of Rahat in order to build over the land for new housing for non-Bedouin.
According to ‘Israeli’ newspaper Haaretz, Nazi regime approved in 2011 plans to transfer tens of thousands of Bedouins in unrecognized villages, including al-Zarnouq, into officially recognized settlements.
The ongoing attempts at transferring the Bedouins originated from the Prawer Report, a document outlining expulsion plans for the unrecognized Bedouin community. It was officially adopted by the Nazi regime in 2013.
According to human rights group Adalah, the plan would “result in the destruction of 35 ‘unrecognized’ Arab Bedouin villages, the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Palestine, and the dispossession of their historical lands in the Negev.”
In another incident in the Negev on Wednesday, the Yoav unit of the Israeli police surrounded the village of Umm al-Hiran. According to locals, residents have expressed fear that their presence could signal another demolition, the last of which erupted into deadly violence when Nazi police raided the village prior to demolishing homes. A local Bedouin teacher and an Israeli police officer were killed at the time.
Meanwhile, the Bedouin village of al-Araqib was demolished for the 109th time on Wednesday.
Bedouin communities in the Negev have been the target of a heightened demolition campaign in recent weeks, following Nazi leaders publicly expressing their commitment to demolish Palestinian structures lacking difficult to obtain Nazi-issued building permits across Nazi and occupied East Jerusalem in response to the Nazi-court sanctioned evacuation of the illegal Amona settler outpost.
In December, Netanyahu released a video to address settlers of the Amona outpost, assuring them that he would commit to “enforcing laws” on “illegal construction” referring primarily to Palestinian communities that are often forced to build without Nazi-issued building permits, due to what rights groups have attributed to discriminatory zoning policies in Nazi which have excluded many Palestinian communities from being included in the regional and municipal development plans.
According to the Association for Civil Rights (ACRI), more than half of the approximately 160,000 Negev Bedouins reside in unrecognized villages.
Rights groups have claimed that the demolitions in Bedouin villages is a central Nazi 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 communities.
