Bulldozers from the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israel Land Authority (ILA) destroyed on Sunday the agricultural farming lands of the Arab citizens in Umm Batin and Tal as-Sabi villages, under the protection of Israeli police and special units.
Witnesses said the police closed the area, prevented the land owners from approaching and destroyed wheat and barley crops. The police claimed the land being planted is state-owned.
In January, bloody clashes erupted between residents of the Negev region and Israeli police after the latter bulldozed their agricultural lands and uprooted olive trees.
Hussein al-Rafay’a, chairman of the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages, said this process is carried out every year to harm the Arabs of the Negev who stick to their land ownership.
He stressed that the destruction process is part of a plan to end the Arab presence in the Negev.
Israel wants the land to remain barren to be easily looted, he added, viewing the destruction of agricultural crops as an extension of the Israeli authorities’ practices to seize Palestinian lands.
The Negev is a very vast area, located in southern Israel and stretching 12 million dunums.
Dr. Mansour al-Nasasra, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), said contrary to Israeli claims, there are dozens of historical documents that indicate that the Arabs of the Negev were aware of the importance of land registration.
They demanded that Ottoman authorities and then the British Mandate to officially recognize their ownership of the lands, he added.
Nasasra referred to the citizens’ meeting in this regard with the British Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill.
The Palestinian academic said many were able to obtain Ottoman and Mandate deeds confirming their ownership of the land. However, Israeli authorities insist that these documents are insufficient.
“We are talking about less than five percent of the land in the Negev,” Nasasra stressed.
He pointed out that the Israeli authorities confiscated 95 percent of these lands in 1948 and now want to confiscate what's left.
