Residents of two unrecognized Palestinian villages were forced to dismantle their own homes — the latest chapter in a decades-long cycle of displacement.

God bless all Bedouins – Peter

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 members of the Al-Nabari family in the unrecognized village of Tel Arad in the Naqab (Negev) desert who had to demolish their own homes, following a 2025 Israeli 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 houses. 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.

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https://www.972mag.com/tel-arad-a-sir-bedouin-naqab-demolitions