Riad El Shtiwi opens a folder with documents in Arabic and Hebrew, compiled over decades, to explain how he and his wife Widad and four of their children (who were born in Israel) ended up here in Gaza amid hunger and bombs. A “here” that is difficult to define: a precarious village in the Israeli Negev desert that has no official name and does not appear on maps, like dozens of other so-called “unrecognized villages,” mainly Bedouin. It is known as Tel Arad, due to its proximity to the archaeological site of the same name, some 25 kilometers from the Dead Sea, although they are separated by an unmarked dirt road with camels on which his family clan has completed a journey through three territories (Egypt, Gaza and Israel) that tells half a century of the history of the Middle East conflict.
In 2005, Israeli authorities relocated Riad and 68 other families from the Armilat, a Bedouin clan originally from the northern coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, to Tel Arad. They were taken from a place that had a name (Dahaniya), but which everyone in Gaza called something else: the “collaborators’ village.” It had been built by the Israeli military authorities in the 1970s (when they controlled both Gaza and Sinai, following their victory in the 1967 Six-Day War) to compensate them for appropriating their land to build the Jewish settlement of Yamit and for spying on them and siding with them during the conflict. When Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1978, part of the clan returned to Sinai. Riad’s family moved to Dahaniya, where they had running water, electricity and half a hectare of land per person.
In 1994, the Oslo Accords between Israelis and Palestinians came into effect, Gaza became (along with Jericho in the West Bank) the first place where the Palestinian flag flew and Dahaniya became a place protected by Israeli barriers and soldiers. The residents themselves sometimes walked around armed and an undisguisable gap separated the Bedouins from the Palestinian collaborators that Israel had placed there in the First Intifada (1987-1993), so that they would not end up killed in the West Bank for having passed information to the enemy. Israelis and Palestinians agreed to leave Dahaniya under Israeli sovereignty “pending a declaration of general amnesty”. [palestina] for the residents of the town.” Neither did it arrive, nor did they ever get rid of the stigma.
In 2005, Ariel Sharon’s government unilaterally decided to withdraw its troops and 9,000 settlers from Gaza, which had become a hornet’s nest, in order to focus on the West Bank. The images that have gone down in history are those of soldiers forcibly removing Jewish settlers dressed in orange, the colour of the movement opposed to the evacuation. No one was very concerned at the time about the fate of the “village of the collaborators”. Although Israel built Dahaniya, it did not include it in the compensation plan for the evacuation, so they received less money than the Jewish settlers. Staying in the new Gaza with the label of collaborator and without the protection of Israeli soldiers was a risky option. Some returned to their origins in Egypt and others asked the Supreme Court to transfer them to Israel. The case ended up on Sharon’s desk, who decided to grant them a temporary residence permit until “it is clear” whether their lives would really be in danger in Gaza.

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The soldiers left them near the inhospitable Tel Arad, with tents and a water tanker. In the chronicles of the time, the evacuees from the clan complained about their new life, with no land for tomatoes, and no electricity. The water tank was also faulty, so they had to walk several kilometres to get water. “They sent us back 30 years,” recalls Riad, while the women prepare lamb and rice for dinner later sitting on the ground near the fire.
For the Bedouin families already living in the area, however, the tanker was a spit in the face after years of unsuccessfully asking the Israeli authorities for a connection to the water and electricity network. The nearby Jewish villages were not very happy about the arrival of “a weak population.” [económicamente] “These people are unemployed and will only increase crime in the area,” said the then mayor of Arad, Moti Brill. A week later, after sermons in mosques against the new arrivals, local Bedouins opened fire on their homes. They fled back to the Gaza border, but the military authorities were very firm: Tel Arad or nothing. “They forced us to go back,” Riad laments.
“Now I am happy to be in Israel, I have no regrets. I did not want to stay in Gaza, nor leave.” [a Egipto]But I was also surprised that they brought us where there is nothing, two kilometers from the main road.

The authorities do not recognise Tel Arad and other settlements (some dating back to before Israel was founded in 1948) in order to pressure their inhabitants to relocate to cities, giving up their traditional way of life. The aim: to free up territory for the expansion of Jewish settlements and military training grounds. Since they are not legal, neither is it legal to build. “All of these have demolition orders,” he says, pointing to two structures. The dynamic contrasts with those Jewish settlements in the West Bank that the State of Israel itself considers illegal: they are very rarely dismantled and over the years they end up receiving protection, funds, electricity, water, access roads and public infrastructure.
Today, the Gazan part of the Kerem Shalom border terminal with Israel stands on the site of the former Dahaniya, and at the time, part of the airport that Gaza had for a short time and which symbolizes, like few others, the collapse of the dream of the peace process. Built with international funds (including from Spain), it celebrated its first flight with pomp in 1998. Four years later, in the midst of the Second Intifada, Israel had already bombed the radar station and the control tower and raised the runway with bulldozers.
Today, Riad, 47, is focused on getting Widad out of Gaza. He calls her his wife, but she is not legally his wife, because Israel has banned polygamy since 1977 and she is his second wife. Widad, 44, is from Rafah. They married in 2007 and had three children (now 15, 14 and 11 years old) during a time when Riad lived in Gaza. In 2016, with him in Israel, she entered on a sick leave and took the opportunity to stay in Tel Arad. “We built her a house and the children studied at the local school,” Riad recalls. They had four other children (now between three and seven years old) who were born in an Israeli hospital (Soroka) and attended school in the country. Two years ago, they were deported back to Gaza because they were in an irregular situation.

Authorities turn a blind eye to polygamy, which is practiced by a third of Negev Bedouins, but it is not legal, so Riyadh had to carry out a DNA test to prove that he is the father of the children and ask for their return. He received the results on 2 October 2023.
Five days later, Hamas launched its brutal surprise attack, Israel began to devastate Gaza and everything (getting someone out of the Strip, moving forward with the paperwork…) became a Herculean task, despite being more urgent than ever. After requests and appointments at the Ministry of the Interior, on July 29 she submitted the family registration form and says she will receive a reply within half a year. “Do you realise what six months in Gaza is like right now?” she protests. “Sometimes I think: ‘we are in times of war, it is complicated…’ But then I realise that it is exactly the other way around. It would be 10 minutes: someone would take them to Kerem Shalom and take them out through there. Hamas is not going to object,” she argues.
Widad, meanwhile, spends her days with her children eating from charity in a makeshift tent near the city of Khan Yunis, after fleeing the advance of troops towards Rafah, where they had at least four concrete walls. “We were not happy in Rafah, because we wanted to return to our home in Israel and the children wanted to be with their father. Now we are worse off, in a tent where it is very hot. People ask me: ‘Your husband is an Israeli citizen, why doesn’t he take you and your children in?’” she says between voice messages and text messages on WhatsApp. “Life is really hard.”
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