Israel to replace Bedouin village with settler commune

Israeli forces are to destroy an expansive village housing Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev Desert and replace it with a settler commune.

The military’s bulldozers will on Tuesday raze their way through the Umm al-Hiran Village, which the regime has branded as “unrecognized,” a designation it has assigned to many such Palestinian villages.

The Bedouins are to be forced from their homes to “planned” townships, while Tel Aviv will be using the area to set up a new village housing Israelis.

A day earlier, Israeli activism group Adalah had petitioned a local court to rule out the planned destruction in Umm al-Hiran.

Villages like Umm al-Hiran, which dot the arid territory, house thousands of Bedouins.

Israel was created in 1948 after a Western-backed military seizure of vast expanses of Arab territories. In 1967, it occupied the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Ever since, it has been changing the territory’s demography by displacing concentrations of Palestinian populations either entirely or on a piecemeal basis.

Over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the occupation of West Bank.

All Israeli settlements are illegal under the international law. Tel Aviv has defied calls to stop settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.