Israel demolishes 80 homes in Palestinian village in Negev, displaces around 400 people

Israeli authorities demolished around 80 homes in the Palestinian village of Al-Dhahiya in the Negev region of southern Israel on Monday, displacing around 400 people, amid accusations that extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is using home demolitions as part of his election campaign.

Israel’s public broadcaster KAN said teams from the Israel Land Authority, accompanied by reinforced police forces under Ben-Gvir’s ministry, demolished around 80 homes on claims that they had been “built without permits” in Al-Dhahiya, an unrecognized village north of the city of Rahat.

The demolition came after the Beersheba District Court on Sunday rejected a petition seeking to postpone the demolitions, the broadcaster said, adding that around 400 people had been living in the homes.

In recent weeks, Ben-Gvir has publicly highlighted the demolition of hundreds of homes belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel, or Israeli Arabs, over alleged construction without permits.

Last Tuesday, Ben-Gvir took part in the demolition of a five-story building housing 70 Palestinians in the At-Tur neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, an action the Jerusalem Governorate described as the “electoral exploitation of Jerusalem at the expense of Palestinians.”

The Joint List, an alliance of three Arab parties, denounced the home demolitions as “a blatant assault on the most basic human and national rights of our people.”

“The demolitions were a continuation of the successive Israeli governments’ policies of demolition, uprooting and displacement against residents of Arab villages in the Negev,” the alliance said.

Hassan al-Nasasra, deputy mayor of Rahat, also denounced the demolitions.

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“The demolitions are not an implementation of the law in any way, but merely election propaganda for the racist Ben-Gvir and his group,” he said in a statement.

KAN also reported that United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas sent an urgent letter to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara demanding an immediate freeze on home demolition orders until the elections are over and a new government is formed.

Israel’s general elections are scheduled for Oct. 27.

Abbas warned against using home demolitions for “political and electoral purposes,” saying Ben-Gvir had publicly boasted about participating in demolitions “in a way that undermines the integrity of the election and the neutrality of law enforcement agencies.”

“Residents of unrecognized villages in the Negev are unable to obtain building permits because of a lack of planning for which the state bears responsibility,” he said, calling for a complete halt to demolitions of inhabited homes in such villages.

Dozens of Palestinian villages in the Negev are not recognized by Israeli authorities, which consider their homes unauthorized and do not connect them to water, electricity or road networks or provide schools, clinics and other basic services.

Last year, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported that demolition orders in the region had risen by as much as 400% since the beginning of that year, drawing fire from Israeli rights organizations, which described the campaign as “discriminatory” and specifically targeting the Bedouin community.

Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev are Arab tribes that have lived in the area for centuries and were there before the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Israel was established in 1948 on lands captured by Zionist armed groups, before occupying the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

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