June 24, 2026
Oren Ziv
Over the course of a week, Farhan became one of around 200 of members of the Al-Nabari family in the unrecognized village of Tel Arad in the Naqab desert who had to demolish their own homes, following a 2025 court ruling ordering them to vacate the land. They did so in order to avoid the steep fines and police raids that often accompany state demolitions in unrecognized villages inside Israel.
The displacement is the latest chapter in a decades-long cycle of uprooting. In 1952, four years after the Naqab came under Israeli control, the Israeli military government expelled the Al-Nabari family from the village of Lakiya and transferred them nearby to Tel Arad. Since then, they have lived there without official recognition or basic infrastructure, building hundreds of homes. Now home to around 3,500 residents, the area had previously been home to members of the Jahalin tribe, who were themselves expelled in 1948; many now live in the E1 corridor of the West Bank between Jerusalem and Jericho, where the state is working once again to displace them.
“We hired lawyers who tried to stop [the demolitions], and went through a long legal process until we reached this day,” Rashid Al-Nabari, Farhan’s son and the last resident in the neighborhood to begin demolishing his house, told +972. “These homes have been here for 70 years. The hand that signed that ruling should have trembled.”
Residents were originally ordered to complete the demolitions and evacuate by June 10. After inspectors from the Israel Land Authority (ILA) visited the site, authorities granted a brief extension until June 14. While Al-Nabari is the first neighborhood in the village to carry out demolitions, residents expect other parts of Tel Arad to receive similar evacuation orders in the near future.
Since the current government took office, there has been a sharp increase in demolitions across the Negev. According to figures from Israel’s National Security Ministry, authorities demolished 5,742 “illegal structures” in the region in 2025, up from 2,850 in 2022. More than 1,000 of those structures were homes. Meanwhile, only 40 families received plots for relocation through Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority.
‘A home is an entire world’
From the state’s perspective, the rise in self-demolitions is a success. When residents destroy their own homes, authorities avoid both the costs of demolition and the harrowing public spectacle of forced eviction.
A demolition operation in the unrecognized village of A-Sir last September involved hundreds of police officers, horses, off-road vehicles, rubber bullets, and residents setting their own homes on fire in protest. The confrontation drew widespread coverage in both local and international media. This week, as residents of A-Sir and Tel Arad once again demolished their own homes, only a handful of journalists arrived.
These demolition campaigns often wipe out entire communities. According to the Bedouin Settlement Authority, around 90 residential clusters have been evacuated over the past two years. Umm Al-Hiran, Wadi Al-Khalil, two neighborhoods in Umm Matanan, and one-third of A-Sir have been completely destroyed.
“It’s an incredibly difficult feeling,” Rashid Al-Nabari said. “A home is an entire world; it’s a roof over your head, it’s security, and now there is no home and no solution.”
The demolitions have upended nearly every aspect of life in Tel Arad, including education. The village school, comprising a number of caravans that normally serve 450 students along with several preschools, has been closed indefinitely since the demolitions began. Some 80 students and four staff members have lost their homes. “There’s no time for education now,” Rashid Al-Nabari lamented.
Part of the reason for the closure is that the school has become a temporary shelter. Classrooms have been turned into sleeping quarters lined with mattresses for women and children, including a one-month-old baby. During the day, the mattresses are pushed aside to make room for improvised kitchens. The men have been sleeping outdoors under trees.
“I think about the children before anyone else,” Farhan Al-Nabari said. “During the demolition, when a child sees his father or brother destroying his own home, it harms them.”
Residents have also been ordered by the ILA to leave the area clean, meaning that they must remove rubble and uproot decades-old trees or face fines. They refused to destroy the trees, but with the help of hundreds of Bedouin volunteers from across the Negev, spent days salvaging building materials, clearing debris, and removing belongings from demolished homes. In some cases, residents set the remaining ruins on fire.
A community divided
The state’s proposed solution would relocate Tel Arad residents affected by the demolitions to newly planned Bedouin communities. But many fear this will fracture a community that has existed for generations.
Some families are expected to move to Marva, a new Bedouin village slated to include 1,000 housing units. Marva is one of five new rural communities planned under the 2024 “Mevo’ot Arad” development scheme. The other four are designated for Jewish residents. On June 11, the government approved NIS 180 million (more than $60 million) to advance the project.
Yet Marva has room for only part of Tel Arad’s population. Other residents are expected to relocate to Mara’it, another planned community two kilometers away, effectively splitting the tight knit community in two.
“The state uprooted me from my land [in Lakiya] in 1952, but then it gave us alternative land,” Farhan Al-Nabari said. “But now there is no alternative — there’s nowhere to go. They offer unacceptable solutions, like living in a quarry [next to the planned village of Mara’it].”
The plan has drawn objections from environmental organizations, planning advocates, and, initially, even the municipality of the majority-Jewish city of Arad. It follows the government’s 2022 approval of Kasif, a new ultra-Orthodox city near the Tel Arad junction, and forms part of a broader effort to Judaize the northern Negev.
According to a planning document prepared by Israeli planning rights NGO Bimkom, existing regional master plans could technically accommodate the recognition of Tel Arad or the expansion of Marva, allowing the community to remain together rather than dispersing its families across multiple localities.
“Thousands of residents of Tel Arad function as a community in every sense,” said Dafna Sporta, head of Bimkom’s Negev division. “Instead of acting fairly and equally and regulating the community that wants to remain together in the village, the state chooses to dismantle it and establish four Jewish villages for people who have not lived on this land for a single day.
“This is a political decision to create a Jewish settlement bloc, as if Bedouin citizens are not part of the State of Israel,” she said.
For residents, the urgency of the demolitions is especially difficult to understand because the alternatives are still largely theoretical. Construction has not yet begun on Mara’it, nor on the Jewish villages planned for the area. As in A-Sir and other recent cases across the Negev, residents are being required to demolish their homes and leave before any actual new housing has been arranged for them.
The planned Jewish housing will fall under the Tamar Regional Council. Marva, by contrast, will belong to the Al-Qasum Regional Council, whose jurisdiction effectively consists of isolated “islands” scattered across the Negev.
Sporta emphasized that Tel Arad’s residents are willing to compromise with the state, including agreeing to move to an expanded Marva. “Expanding Marva is the right and just thing to do,” she said. Instead, she said, the state seeks “to Judaize the area while completely ignoring the people who already live there.”
‘War on eight fronts’
On Tuesday afternoon, June 16, residents of A-Sir also demolished around 20 of their own homes. Like the families in Tel Arad, many residents of A-Sir have been living on the site for decades. After being relocated there by Israeli authorities in the 1950s, they spent nearly 80 years building a community. This week, two rented bulldozers, paid for by the residents themselves, reduced part of it to rubble in a matter of hours.
“We’re demolishing it so we don’t get a fine,” said Nasser Al-Afshak, a resident in his forties. “It feels terrible. I have children who are in college, and instead of studying, we’re being evicted. I’ll live in a tent just like my grandparents did here.”
Located along Route 40 between Be’er Sheva and Tel Arad, last year A-Sir became a symbol of the struggle against demolitions. The self-demolition of dozens of homes — including that of the late Knesset member Sa’id Al-Harumi — led to mass protests outside government offices, courts, and the headquarters of the Bedouin Settlement Authority in Be’er Sheva. Those demonstrations largely subsided after the war with Iran in June of last year, but the demolition policy continued.
“Ben Gvir wants to destroy lives, not houses,” Al-Afshak said as he and his seven sons emptied out three family homes, including one completed just six months ago. “[The authorities] don’t care where we go. I told them we have nowhere to rent, and they said, ‘That’s not our problem,’” he remembered. “I’m just asking for a place to live.”
Some families whose homes were demolished months ago are still living in tents among the ruins. Only one residential compound in Al-Afshak’s neighborhood has received official state permission to remain. The area is supposed to undergo development and become a new neighborhood of the Bedouin town Segev Shalom (Shaqib Al-Salam), where housing is supposed to be provided for displaced residents. But, according to residents, the development process is moving at a snail’s pace. They say the state has moved far more quickly to pressure families into demolishing their own homes than to provide viable alternatives.
Court proceedings involving the Al-Afshak family last year illustrate the gap between demolition orders and available housing. At a hearing in November, attorney Nawaf Abu Qweider, who represented the family, asked Yigal Buskila, deputy director-general for regulation at Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority, when plots in the planned neighborhood would actually be ready for residents to move into.
“On this order of magnitude,” Buskila replied, “it could be between a month and a half and two months,” while noting that the timeline still depended on approvals, plot allocations and signed agreements.
Following those assurances, the state undertook not to carry out demolitions before the beginning of April, and the family withdrew its request to cancel the demolition orders. Yet seven months later, the Al-Afshak family was forced to demolish its homes despite still lacking a clear alternative housing solution.
“The government is responsible for these demolitions,” said Atiya Al-Asam, chairman of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages. “The government says it wants to wage wars on seven fronts, but in reality it is waging war on eight fronts, with the eighth front being the Negev and the unrecognized villages.”
Activists hope the latest wave of demolitions will reignite public opposition to the policy. On Thursday, June 25, residents and supporters are expected to demonstrate outside the offices of Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority, calling for a halt to the demolitions and for housing solutions to be provided before families are forced to leave their homes.
Oren Ziv
Residents of two
unrecognized Palestinian villages were forced to dismantle their own homes —
the latest chapter in a decades-long cycle of displacement.
Farhan Al-Nabari sat
beside a few discarded mattresses and pieces of furniture staring at what had
been his home only days earlier. “It’s a disaster,” the 75-year-old told +972
Magazine on June 14, staring at what was now a pile of rubble. “We experienced
a Nakba [catastrophe] in 1952, when we were removed from our lands in Lakiya,
and now this is a second Nakba.”
Over the course of a week, Farhan became one of around 200 of members of the Al-Nabari family in the unrecognized village of Tel Arad in the Naqab desert who had to demolish their own homes, following a 2025 court ruling ordering them to vacate the land. They did so in order to avoid the steep fines and police raids that often accompany state demolitions in unrecognized villages inside Israel.
The displacement is the latest chapter in a decades-long cycle of uprooting. In 1952, four years after the Naqab came under Israeli control, the Israeli military government expelled the Al-Nabari family from the village of Lakiya and transferred them nearby to Tel Arad. Since then, they have lived there without official recognition or basic infrastructure, building hundreds of homes. Now home to around 3,500 residents, the area had previously been home to members of the Jahalin tribe, who were themselves expelled in 1948; many now live in the E1 corridor of the West Bank between Jerusalem and Jericho, where the state is working once again to displace them.
“We hired lawyers who tried to stop [the demolitions], and went through a long legal process until we reached this day,” Rashid Al-Nabari, Farhan’s son and the last resident in the neighborhood to begin demolishing his house, told +972. “These homes have been here for 70 years. The hand that signed that ruling should have trembled.”
Residents were originally ordered to complete the demolitions and evacuate by June 10. After inspectors from the Israel Land Authority (ILA) visited the site, authorities granted a brief extension until June 14. While Al-Nabari is the first neighborhood in the village to carry out demolitions, residents expect other parts of Tel Arad to receive similar evacuation orders in the near future.
Since the current government took office, there has been a sharp increase in demolitions across the Negev. According to figures from Israel’s National Security Ministry, authorities demolished 5,742 “illegal structures” in the region in 2025, up from 2,850 in 2022. More than 1,000 of those structures were homes. Meanwhile, only 40 families received plots for relocation through Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority.
‘A home is an entire world’
From the state’s perspective, the rise in self-demolitions is a success. When residents destroy their own homes, authorities avoid both the costs of demolition and the harrowing public spectacle of forced eviction.
A demolition operation in the unrecognized village of A-Sir last September involved hundreds of police officers, horses, off-road vehicles, rubber bullets, and residents setting their own homes on fire in protest. The confrontation drew widespread coverage in both local and international media. This week, as residents of A-Sir and Tel Arad once again demolished their own homes, only a handful of journalists arrived.
These demolition campaigns often wipe out entire communities. According to the Bedouin Settlement Authority, around 90 residential clusters have been evacuated over the past two years. Umm Al-Hiran, Wadi Al-Khalil, two neighborhoods in Umm Matanan, and one-third of A-Sir have been completely destroyed.
“It’s an incredibly difficult feeling,” Rashid Al-Nabari said. “A home is an entire world; it’s a roof over your head, it’s security, and now there is no home and no solution.”
The demolitions have upended nearly every aspect of life in Tel Arad, including education. The village school, comprising a number of caravans that normally serve 450 students along with several preschools, has been closed indefinitely since the demolitions began. Some 80 students and four staff members have lost their homes. “There’s no time for education now,” Rashid Al-Nabari lamented.
Part of the reason for the closure is that the school has become a temporary shelter. Classrooms have been turned into sleeping quarters lined with mattresses for women and children, including a one-month-old baby. During the day, the mattresses are pushed aside to make room for improvised kitchens. The men have been sleeping outdoors under trees.
“I think about the children before anyone else,” Farhan Al-Nabari said. “During the demolition, when a child sees his father or brother destroying his own home, it harms them.”
Residents have also been ordered by the ILA to leave the area clean, meaning that they must remove rubble and uproot decades-old trees or face fines. They refused to destroy the trees, but with the help of hundreds of Bedouin volunteers from across the Negev, spent days salvaging building materials, clearing debris, and removing belongings from demolished homes. In some cases, residents set the remaining ruins on fire.
A community divided
The state’s proposed solution would relocate Tel Arad residents affected by the demolitions to newly planned Bedouin communities. But many fear this will fracture a community that has existed for generations.
Some families are expected to move to Marva, a new Bedouin village slated to include 1,000 housing units. Marva is one of five new rural communities planned under the 2024 “Mevo’ot Arad” development scheme. The other four are designated for Jewish residents. On June 11, the government approved NIS 180 million (more than $60 million) to advance the project.
Yet Marva has room for only part of Tel Arad’s population. Other residents are expected to relocate to Mara’it, another planned community two kilometers away, effectively splitting the tight knit community in two.
“The state uprooted me from my land [in Lakiya] in 1952, but then it gave us alternative land,” Farhan Al-Nabari said. “But now there is no alternative — there’s nowhere to go. They offer unacceptable solutions, like living in a quarry [next to the planned village of Mara’it].”
The plan has drawn objections from environmental organizations, planning advocates, and, initially, even the municipality of the majority-Jewish city of Arad. It follows the government’s 2022 approval of Kasif, a new ultra-Orthodox city near the Tel Arad junction, and forms part of a broader effort to Judaize the northern Negev.
According to a planning document prepared by Israeli planning rights NGO Bimkom, existing regional master plans could technically accommodate the recognition of Tel Arad or the expansion of Marva, allowing the community to remain together rather than dispersing its families across multiple localities.
“Thousands of residents of Tel Arad function as a community in every sense,” said Dafna Sporta, head of Bimkom’s Negev division. “Instead of acting fairly and equally and regulating the community that wants to remain together in the village, the state chooses to dismantle it and establish four Jewish villages for people who have not lived on this land for a single day.
“This is a political decision to create a Jewish settlement bloc, as if Bedouin citizens are not part of the State of Israel,” she said.
For residents, the urgency of the demolitions is especially difficult to understand because the alternatives are still largely theoretical. Construction has not yet begun on Mara’it, nor on the Jewish villages planned for the area. As in A-Sir and other recent cases across the Negev, residents are being required to demolish their homes and leave before any actual new housing has been arranged for them.
The planned Jewish housing will fall under the Tamar Regional Council. Marva, by contrast, will belong to the Al-Qasum Regional Council, whose jurisdiction effectively consists of isolated “islands” scattered across the Negev.
Sporta emphasized that Tel Arad’s residents are willing to compromise with the state, including agreeing to move to an expanded Marva. “Expanding Marva is the right and just thing to do,” she said. Instead, she said, the state seeks “to Judaize the area while completely ignoring the people who already live there.”
‘War on eight fronts’
On Tuesday afternoon, June 16, residents of A-Sir also demolished around 20 of their own homes. Like the families in Tel Arad, many residents of A-Sir have been living on the site for decades. After being relocated there by Israeli authorities in the 1950s, they spent nearly 80 years building a community. This week, two rented bulldozers, paid for by the residents themselves, reduced part of it to rubble in a matter of hours.
“We’re demolishing it so we don’t get a fine,” said Nasser Al-Afshak, a resident in his forties. “It feels terrible. I have children who are in college, and instead of studying, we’re being evicted. I’ll live in a tent just like my grandparents did here.”
Located along Route 40 between Be’er Sheva and Tel Arad, last year A-Sir became a symbol of the struggle against demolitions. The self-demolition of dozens of homes — including that of the late Knesset member Sa’id Al-Harumi — led to mass protests outside government offices, courts, and the headquarters of the Bedouin Settlement Authority in Be’er Sheva. Those demonstrations largely subsided after the war with Iran in June of last year, but the demolition policy continued.
“Ben Gvir wants to destroy lives, not houses,” Al-Afshak said as he and his seven sons emptied out three family homes, including one completed just six months ago. “[The authorities] don’t care where we go. I told them we have nowhere to rent, and they said, ‘That’s not our problem,’” he remembered. “I’m just asking for a place to live.”
Some families whose homes were demolished months ago are still living in tents among the ruins. Only one residential compound in Al-Afshak’s neighborhood has received official state permission to remain. The area is supposed to undergo development and become a new neighborhood of the Bedouin town Segev Shalom (Shaqib Al-Salam), where housing is supposed to be provided for displaced residents. But, according to residents, the development process is moving at a snail’s pace. They say the state has moved far more quickly to pressure families into demolishing their own homes than to provide viable alternatives.
Court proceedings involving the Al-Afshak family last year illustrate the gap between demolition orders and available housing. At a hearing in November, attorney Nawaf Abu Qweider, who represented the family, asked Yigal Buskila, deputy director-general for regulation at Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority, when plots in the planned neighborhood would actually be ready for residents to move into.
“On this order of magnitude,” Buskila replied, “it could be between a month and a half and two months,” while noting that the timeline still depended on approvals, plot allocations and signed agreements.
Following those assurances, the state undertook not to carry out demolitions before the beginning of April, and the family withdrew its request to cancel the demolition orders. Yet seven months later, the Al-Afshak family was forced to demolish its homes despite still lacking a clear alternative housing solution.
“The government is responsible for these demolitions,” said Atiya Al-Asam, chairman of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages. “The government says it wants to wage wars on seven fronts, but in reality it is waging war on eight fronts, with the eighth front being the Negev and the unrecognized villages.”
Activists hope the latest wave of demolitions will reignite public opposition to the policy. On Thursday, June 25, residents and supporters are expected to demonstrate outside the offices of Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority, calling for a halt to the demolitions and for housing solutions to be provided before families are forced to leave their homes.
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