BEERSHEBA (Ma’an) — Bulldozers under the armed guard of Israeli forces demolished two homes in the Bedouin villages of Hura and Khashem Zanna in the Negev on Wednesday, local sources said.The Israeli Land Authority did not immediately respond for comment.
The demolitions come amid ongoing efforts to push local Bedouin Palestinian communities from the area.Earlier this month, members of the Knesset — the Israeli parliament — began discussing a plan shelved in 2013 that would forcibly relocate tens-of-thousands of Bedouin Palestinians.The Prawer Plan was approved by the Israeli government in 2011 but frozen in 2013 amid widespread protest among Palestinians within Israel and international condemnation.Israeli minister of agriculture Uri Ariel of the Habayit Hayehudi party (Jewish Home) has since reintroduced the plan. His party conditioned joining Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s government coalition in March on reinstating the Prawer Plan.Residents of Hura and Khashem Zanna are part of approximately 160,000 Bedouin Palestinians residing in the Negev, over half of whom live in unrecognized villages which the state refuses to provide with a planning structure and place under municipal jurisdiction, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.Entire communities have been issued demolition orders while others are denied basic services.The UN reports that 70 percent of Bedouin communities are refugees, driven from their land during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
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