It was dawn on Saturday, October 7, when a loud explosion sounded in Al Bat, a Bedouin village in Israel's Negev desert not recognized by the authorities. Akel Kran, 46, said he went with other neighbours to check if the sheep had been damaged. Everything is in order. As it was not the first time that rockets had arrived from Gaza, some 50 kilometers away, they went about their business. Normality. None of those present knew that, at the time, Hamas, in addition to firing missiles as it often does, was also carrying out the major ground attack that left some 1,200 dead and triggered the current war.
Minutes after the aforementioned impact, at around seven in the morning, another explosion sounded in Al Bat, little more than a handful of houses and shacks scattered on a stony ground that represents well the harsh reality under which the Bedouins live in Israel. This had an impact on the sheq, the meeting place of the men of the community. The prefabricated aluminum-based room was blown up, Kran explains in a soft voice and a quiet expression. Inside were four children: brothers Jawad, and Malik, aged 12 and 15; Amin, 10, and Mohammad, 15, with an adult. Taleb, Kran's 37-year-old brother, was wounded and more than three weeks later was still in the hospital. All four children died. The two brothers, on the spot. The other two, on their way to the hospital. Amin was one of Akel Kran's nine sons.
These children are part of a group of 18 Bedouins who lost their lives on 7 October, seven in rocket fire and 11 in the ground incursion by Islamic radicals. There are also six hostages among the group of about 240 taken to Gaza. The war serves as a reminder of the traditional institutional neglect of the Bedouin community. "In these villages we are not protected by the iron dome (anti-aircraft system) because it is an unrecognized area. We also don't have ambulances, shelters, an alarm system...", laments Kran without hardly altering his gesture as he sips a small cardboard cup with coffee. The man tries to describe the situation in which an important part of his community continues to live, 75 years after Israel's existence.
A resident of al-Bat, a Bedouin village not recognized by Israel, next to a concrete tube that serves as a bomb shelter and was installed after a rocket fired by Hamas killed four children on the morning of October 7. Luis De Vega Hernandez
Solar panels on a house in Makhul, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert that lacks basic services like the rest of the villages, up to 37 of this community, which Israel does not recognize. Luis De Vega Hernandez
A child from Makhul, a Bedouin village not recognized by Israel, stands next to the remains of a tin house that was hit by a Hamas missile without causing casualties. Luis De Vega Hernandez
A young resident of Makhul, who has no road, no school, no health centre, and no shelter from the Hamas rocket attacks that have hit the village in recent weeks. Luis De Vega Hernandez
A neighbor next to the place where until a few days ago his house occupied in Makhul, a Bedouin village in southern Israel, where a Hamas missile hit.Luis De Vega Hernández
A resident of Al Bat consults his mobile phone inside one of the rooms used by the men of this Bedouin community not recognized by Israel.Luis De Vega Hernández
A child in al-Bat, a Bedouin town that Israel does not recognize and where it is not allowed to officially build or have an address despite the fact that its inhabitants are Israeli citizens. Luis De Vega Hernandez
Residents of Al Bat next to one of the reservoirs from which they get their water supplies, as this and the other unrecognized villages do not have essential services and supplies. Luis De Vega Hernandez
A neighbor inside a tent in Makhul, a Bedouin village not recognized by Israel in the Negev desert, where most of the more than 300,000 members of this community live. Luis De Vega Hernandez
During the early hours of October 7 alone, the Islamist militia fired some 3,000 rockets from the Strip into Israeli territory, according to data released by the army last week. Most were intercepted. During the last Gaza war in 2014, 4,000 missiles were launched in 50 days. Al Bat, which encompasses an area of about 400 residents, is one of the 37 villages that the Israeli authorities consider illegal, that do not exist on the map and that, therefore, are not equipped with the most essentials. There's no road to get there. Everything is outside: school, health, market, work, services... And in times of war like the current one, unlike other Israelis, they also have no shelters to protect themselves from missiles or safe rooms in their homes, if you can call them that.
In Makhul, another village with houses in the form of huts strung together from sheet metal, children play next to the heaped mass of metal materials that made up one of the houses until it was destroyed without causing casualties by another projectile from Gaza. At dusk, the muezzin's call to prayer from the mosque rivals the roar of the passing warplanes bombing the Strip, where they have already killed more than 11,000 people.
The organization Adalah, which fights for the rights of the Israeli Arab community, denounced to the authorities on October 30 the "systematic discrimination and negligence of the state" against most Bedouin villages, both recognized and not, due to the absence of bomb shelters or other protected areas. The complaint also refers to thousands of children in that community whose lives are "at risk" because they have to go to school without the protection measures that are covered in other areas of the country. "The land of the Bedouins is gold for Israel," says Marwan Abu Frieh, Adalah's coordinator in the Negev, a desert they refer to as Naqab in Arabic.
He believes that the Israeli state is not ignoring the Bedouins, it is trying to destroy their way of life, their traditions, their culture and the places where they have been settled for centuries. "The government insists on moving them, removing them from their lands and resettling them and not offering them solutions because that would mean that they assume, officially, that they could stay where they have been living all their lives. We have to constantly resort to the courts," warns the coordinator of Adalah in the Negev area. According to him, due to the lack of shelters, only seven of the 13 small health centers in the area are functioning.
Together with other organizations, they are trying to fill the security vacuum that the war has revealed and are trying to set up shelters in the villages. Khaled Eldada is one of the volunteers who, in a truck with a crane, placed a hundred of them in the second half of October. Two have arrived at Al Bat. A group of camels graze around one of them. It is a simple concrete pipe inside which they estimate that about twenty people can get in.
Half of Israel's Bedouin population lives in these illegal villages without the right to build a house, without infrastructure, without running water, without electricity, without a sewage system, without education or minimum health services, says Yelaa Raanan, of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages. They live under constant threat of demolition of their homes in places where there is no transportation, he adds. In addition, even though it is compulsory and for Israeli citizens, there are some 5,000 children without access to childcare. "They are the poorest," Raanan concludes, stressing that these hundred shelters are less than 10% of those needed.
"It's very difficult to be a good student living in these conditions," said Suleiman Kamalat, the principal of the school in Rahat, the largest Bedouin town, where Jawad was a fifth-grader until Hamas rocket killed him on Oct. 7. On the screen, he shows the ranking of the best records, including yours. Several kids from Al Bat show the reporter on their mobile phones during a walk through the village portraits of the four colleagues they lost that day and photos of the collective burial.
The Bedouin population of Palestinian origin in the Israeli Negev today numbers about 310,000 people, who are descendants of those who inhabited that desert area when the State of Israel was born in 1948. Of these, some 80,000 are in 37 settlements without official recognition; another 35,000, in 11 localities recognized at the beginning of this century, but which remain without the necessary provision of services, and the rest, about 195,000, in seven municipalities created by the authorities between 1969 and 1989. Two-thirds of Bedouins, whose community is part of Israel's 20 percent Arab population, live in the Negev below the poverty line, a rate three times the country's average.
Several activists gather at a municipal hall in Hura, a Bedouin town that is one of the most recognized. They are convinced that the moment is not only a disaster because of the conflict but also because the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not going to do anything for them. One of those present is Ezry Keydar, director of the Israeli NGO Keshet, which has been fighting for years for the recognition of the Bedouin community and for the preservation of their culture and ancestral way of life. At the moment when Marwan Abu Frieh, a Bedouin, takes the opportunity to say goodbye and get into his SUV, Keydar throws him a friendly jab between laughs, trying to make it seem that he no longer has the pedigree of a man of the desert: "Being Bedouin is not an origin, it is a way of life".
Children in the village of Makhul, in southern Israel, where different humanitarian organizations denounce the neglect of authorities who try to separate the Bedouin community from their traditional way of life in the desert. Luis De Vega Hernandez
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