“I can’t explain these feelings,” Mr. al-Qadi’s brother said in a video shared by Israel’s official account on X, taken before he saw him again. “It’s better than being born again.”
The 52-year-old, a Muslim and member of Israel’s Bedouin community, is from a village near Rahat, in southern Israel. He was working as a security guard in a small Israeli kibbutz, called Magen, near the Gaza border, when he was abducted, according to Israel officials.
Hagari denied rumors that al-Qadi managed to escape the tunnel in which he was held, saying that troops “rescued Farhan from underground, he met our forces underground.”
Al-Qadi was not discovered by Israeli special forces “by chance” as some reports described, although there was no pre-planned operation to specifically rescue him, military sources said.
Prior to merging it with the newly declared union, Organi led the Union of Sinai Tribes (UST), a pro-government paramilitary group set up in 2015 to support the Egyptian army in its battles against a local offshoot of the Islamic State (IS). The UST’s mission in Sinai has been unclear since the IS-affiliate group known as the Sinai Province was officially defeated in 2022.
The bloody, 10-year campaign in the Sinai has almost completely razed Rafah and uprooted thousands of members of the indigenous Bedouin population, leaving most towns and villages pulverised.
(08.04.2021)
The former president of Rabbis for Human Rights was violently assaulted by a far-right Israeli settler on Wednesday, April 7 near the illegal Maale Ahuvia outpost in the occupied Palestinian territories. Video footage of the brutal attack shows Rabbi Arik Ascherman conversing with a masked settler, then suddenly being attacked by another who repeatedly beats him with a long wooden club while, off-camera, cries of “No violence” are intoned.
According to Zo Haderech, Ascherman arrived at the scene after he had been contacted by local Palestinians.
Israel is both a Jewish and democratic state, and as such, must act to make sure all its citizens enjoy equal rights under the law. Israel’s minorities include the Arab population (both Christian and Muslim), Bedouins (with their unique set of challenges), Druze, and Circassians. Each population must be listened to and helped individually.
Israel’s success as a nation, both financially and socially, goes hand in hand with the prosperity of its non-Jewish population. It relies heavily on the government’s ability to offer every citizen full rights and opportunities.
Israeli rights group B‘Tselem has accused Israel of creating „a Kafkaesque reality that leaves Palestinians almost no way to build legally“.
‚I want to maintain a Jewish majority, not just in the State of Israel but in the Negev as well‘
Israeli lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich, known for incendiary anti-Arab comments, said on Thursday that the birth rates of Israeli Bedouins posed an existential threat for the Jewish State, akin to a bomb that must be diffused.
The idea, according to the state’s Ministry of Economy, is to compete with Silicon Valley.
The Defense Ministry filed a civil suit this week for about 100,000 shekels ($29,000) against a Bedouin cowherd whose cows entered a firing zone near the Tze’elim army base in the Negev, forcing the army to stop training. According to the Southern District prosecution, which represents the Defense Ministry, this is the first time the state has sued for financial compensation over such an incident.
The injunction came after the Likud party submitted a petition arguing that Zazim, which is heavily funded by the US-based New Israel Fund, an organization that has butted heads with the Likud party before, was violating election laws with its initiative.
In 2017 the V15 law was passed in order to prevent foreign funded non-party political organizations from interfering with the elections.
(12.09.2019)
Two days before the last Israeli election in April, Israel’s ruling Likud Party petitioned the Central Elections Committee to shut down a get out the vote operation by an Israeli campaigning organization called Zazim — an organization that Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN) and I co-founded with activist Raluca Ganea four years ago, which functions very much like an Israeli version of MoveOn.org. The government’s efforts were unsuccessful, and Zazim’s campaign went ahead as planned, bringing thousands of Arab Bedouin voters from unrecognized villages in southern Israel to their polling places.
Last week, the Likud Party once again petitioned the Central Elections Committee to prevent Zazim from helping citizens exercise their right to vote. Today, Israel’s Attorney General confirmed that Zazim’s activity is fully legal. Zazim’s organizers plan to help some 15,000 Arab voters cast their ballots next Tuesday.
Only Egyptians born to Egyptian parents can own land, but proving where your great-grandparents are from is not easy given that Bedouins generally don’t have birth certificates or ID cards.
(22.12.2018) In response to the ruling, which followed a protracted legal battle, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised, on more than one occasion, that the village in the Judean desert on the road which descends from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, will be razed“very soon.”
“I will not tell you when, but we are preparing for it,” he promised.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda yesterday warned Israel against demolishing the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar and displacing its residents saying the action could constitute a “war crime”.
“Extensive destruction of property without military necessity and population transfers in an occupied territory constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute,” Bensouda said in a statement.
In view of the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which began Wednesday, the government decided to put off the demolition and evacuation of the Jahalin Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar for a few days, so as not to embarrass her.
WAFA correspondent said Israeli soldiers fired rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas canisters, and stun grenades toward the students who rallied in protest of Israel’s Nation-state Law and its planned demolition of Khan al-Ahmar Bedouin community, east of Jerusalem.
Holding posters of Angela Merkel ahead of a scheduled visit to Israel by the German chancellor, Bedouin children appealed to her on Tuesday to help block Israeli plans to raze their hamlet in the occupied West Bank.
“This act is not only heartless and discriminatory; it is illegal. The forcible transfer of the Khan al-Ahmar community amounts to a war crime. Israel must end its policy of destroying Palestinians’ homes and livelihoods to make way for settlements.”
Khan al-Ahmar, which is located near Route 1, is home to several dozen families from the Jahalin tribe. The tribe originated in the Negev and was expelled to the West Bank in the 1950s. Aerial photographs and testimony by villagers show that the residents wandered within the Jerusalem-Jericho region before gradually establishing permanent residence in Khan al-Ahmar, apparently in or around the 1970s.
First the state wanted them to live next to a garbage dump. Then it told the Jahalin Bedouin they’d be moved near a large sewage-treatment site where human habitation has been forbidden. And that’s not the end of the story
The Portuguese Parliament voted in favor of a bill that condemns the Israeli decision to expel Palestinian Bedouins living in village of Khan Al-Ahmar in occupied East Jerusalem.
Israel’s top court suspended on Thursday the planned demolition of a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank whose fate has become a focus of Palestinian protests and international concern, a lawyer for the residents said.
The European Union and the United Nations have called on the Israeli regime to halt its plan to raze the village, saying such actions are contrary to international law and undermine peace efforts.
The court ruled that the village was built without the relevant building permits.
Critics say such permits are nearly impossible to obtain for Palestinians in Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank.