It was dawn on Saturday, October 7, when a loud explosion rang out in Al Bat, a Bedouin village in the Israeli Negev desert not recognized by the authorities. Akel Kran, 46, says that he went with other neighbors to check if the sheep had been damaged. All in order. As it was not the first time that rockets arrived from Gaza, about 50 kilometers away, they continued with their tasks. Normal. None of those present knew that, at that moment, Hamas, in addition to launching missiles as it frequently does, was also carrying out the major ground attack that left some 1,200 dead and sparked the current war.
Minutes after the aforementioned impact, around seven in the morning, another explosion rang out in Al Bat, little more than a handful of houses and shacks scattered across a rocky area that well represents the harsh reality under which the Bedouins live in Israel. This impacted the sheq, the meeting place for the men of the community. The prefabricated room made of aluminum jumped into the air, Kran explains in a soft voice and with a quiet expression. Inside were four children: the brothers Jawad and Malik, ages 12 and 15; Amin, 10, and Mohammad, 15, with an adult. Taleb, 37 years old and Kran’s brother, was injured and more than three weeks later he was still hospitalized. 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.
These children are part of the group of 18 Bedouins who lost their lives on October 7, seven from rocket fire and 11 in the ground incursion by Islamic radicals. There are also six hostages among the group of about 240 who were taken to Gaza. The war serves to remember the traditional institutional forgetfulness of the Bedouin community. “In these towns we are not protected by the iron dome (anti-aircraft system) because it is an unrecognized area. We also don’t have ambulances, shelters, alarm systems…” Kran deplores, barely altering his gesture while sipping a cardboard cup of coffee. The man tries to describe the situation in which he continues to live, 75 years after Israel existed, an important part of his community.
During the first hours of October 7 alone, the Islamist militia launched some 3,000 rockets from the Strip into Israeli territory, according to data made public by the army last week. Most were intercepted. During the last Gaza war, in 2014, 4,000 missiles were launched in 50 days. Al Bat, which encompasses an area of about 400 residents, is one of the 37 towns that the Israeli authorities consider illegal, that do not exist on the map and that, therefore, are not equipped with the most essentials. There is no road to get there. They have everything outside: school, health, market, work, services… And in times of war like the current one, unlike other Israelis, they do not have shelters to protect themselves from missiles or safe rooms in their homes, if necessary. that can be called that.
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In Makhul, another village with houses like huts strung together from sheet metal, some children played next to the piled-up mass of 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 fighter planes that bomb the Strip, where they have already killed more than 11,000 people.
The Adalah organization, which fights for the rights of the Israeli Arab community, denounced to the authorities on October 30 the “systematic discrimination and neglect of the State” with the majority of Bedouin villages, both recognized and not, due to the absence of shelters. anti-aircraft or other protected areas. The complaint also refers to thousands of children from that community whose lives are “at risk” for having to go to class without the protection measures that are covered in other areas of the country. “The land of the Bedouins is gold for Israel,” says Marwan Abu Frieh, coordinator of Adalah in the Negev, a desert they refer to as Naqab, in Arabic.
He believes that the Israeli State is not ignoring the Bedouins, it is trying to end their way of life, their traditions, their culture and the places where they have settled for centuries. “The Government insists on moving them, removing them from their lands and resettling them and not offering them solutions because that would mean that they assume, officially, that they could stay where they have been living all their lives. We have to constantly resort to the courts,” warns the Adalah coordinator in the Negev area. According to him, due to the lack of shelters, only seven of the 13 small health centers in the area are functioning.
Together with other organizations, they try to fill the security vacuum that the war has revealed and try to install shelters in the villages. Jaled Eldada is one of the volunteers who, on a truck with a crane, placed a hundred of them in the second half of October. Two have arrived at Al Bat. A group of camels grazes around one of them. It is a simple concrete pipe into which they estimate that around twenty people can fit.
Half of the Israeli Bedouin population lives in these illegal villages without the right to build a house, without infrastructure, without running water, without electricity, without a sewage system, without education or minimum health services, critic Yelaa Raanan, of the Council Regional of Unrecognized Bedouin Peoples. They live under constant threat of demolition of their homes in places where there is no transportation, she adds. Furthermore, even though it is mandatory and in the case of Israeli citizens, there are about 5,000 children without access to daycare. “They are the poorest,” concludes Raanan, emphasizing that these hundred shelters are less than 10% of those needed.
“It is very difficult to be a good student living in these conditions,” says Suleiman Kamalat, director of the school in Rahat, the largest Bedouin town, where Jawad was studying fifth grade until the Hamas rocket killed him on October 7. The screen shows the classification of the best files, among which is yours. Several kids from Al Bat show the reporter on their cell phones during a walk through the town portraits of the four colleagues they lost that day and photos of the collective burial.
The Bedouin population of Palestinian origin in the Israeli Negev today numbers around 310,000 people, who are descendants of those who inhabited that desert area when the State of Israel was born in 1948. Of them, about 80,000 are in 37 settlements without official recognition; another 35,000, in 11 localities recognized at the beginning of this century, but which remain without the necessary provision of services, and the rest, about 195,000, in seven municipalities created by the authorities between 1969 and 1989. Two thirds of the Bedouins, whose community They are part of the 20% of the Israeli Arab population, living in the Negev below the poverty line, a rate that is triple the country’s average.
Several activists meet at a municipal premises in Hura, one of the recognized Bedouin towns. They are convinced that the moment is not only a disaster because of the conflict but also because the Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not going to do anything 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. At the moment that Marwan Abu Frieh, a Bedouin, takes the opportunity to say goodbye and get into his SUV, Keydar launches a friendly barb at him while laughing, trying to show that he no longer has the pedigree of a man of the desert: “Being a Bedouin is not an origin, it is a way of life.”
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