30.7 - For the Record: razed Negev village

For the Record: razed Negev village

For the Record: According to Albawaba, a news site out of Jordan, on August 1 Israeli forces demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev region of southern Israel. It was the 116th time since 2010 the village had been leveled and the eighth time this year.

Al-Araqib is one of 35 Bedouin villages considered "unrecognized" by Israel. According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, more than half of the approximately 160,000 Bedouins in the Negev reside in unrecognized villages.

A Bedouin village in the Negev

The villages were established in the wake of the 1948 war, with many Bedouins being forcibly transferred to the village sites in the ensuing 17 years. Now, more than 60 years after their founding, the villages remain "unrecognized," unable to connect to the national water and electricity grids and blocked from health and educational services.

One time when Israeli courts found that a Jewish "outpost" in the West Bank called Amona was illegally built on land owned by Palestinians, the government tried every way it could to avoid having to remove the settlers. It was finally evacuated on February 1 of this year - almost immediately after which the Israeli parliament passed a law retroactively legalizing other such "outposts," including those build on stolen Palestinian land.