Press Releases

21/8/2025

From the Naqab to the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli regime systematically deploys legal, bureaucratic, and military tools to erase Palestinian presence and restructure territory for settler-colonial implantation. With the inaction, evasive measures and complicity of third states, not only is the genocide ongoing but so is Israeli colonial expansion and entrenchment across all of Mandatory Palestine. Land theft and forcible displacement have most recently intensified in Palestinian Bedouin communities. Whether it's through the reactivation of the Prawer Plan or the escalation of the Decisive Plan, the Israeli regime entrenches its pillars of forced displacement and transfer, colonization and apartheid under the ineffective and complicit eyes of states. Regardless of where Palestinians reside, or what Israeli-imposed legal status they hold, the Israeli regime’s ultimate goal is to control the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians.

1948 Palestine: The Naqab and Palestinian Bedouin with Israeli citizenship 

Palestinians across 1948 Palestine have been experiencing escalated demolitions in many towns and cities. Forced displacement of Palestinians through Israeli-imposed demolitions has escalated significantly in the southern areas of the Naqab, where 300,000 Palestinian Bedouins reside.

Before 1948, the seasonal movements of Palestinian Bedouin across their ancestral lands were common and colonial concepts of private land ownership had not been formally codified. During and after the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab were forcibly uprooted by the newly established Israeli colonial-apartheid regime as the lack of codification rendered them “landless.” While many became refugees, others were internally displaced and confined into 7 Israeli established townships, ‘recognized villages,’ and 35 ‘unrecognized villages,’ prevented from exercising their semi-nomadic way of life.  Many that remained were provided with Israeli citizenship, an inferior status under the Israeli regime’s apartheid Nationality Law, facing the constant threat of revocation, dispossessed of their lands and denied from returning to them.

Nearly 90,000 Palestinians live in the 35 ‘unrecognized villages,’ and are denied electricity, water, education, and healthcare, in a deliberately orchestrated coercive environment. The Israeli 2012 Prawer Plan epitomised colonial domination and land theft, proposing the demolition of dozens of the unrecognized villages and the forced transfer of 40,000 Palestinians to other urbanised townships. Although the plan itself was temporarily suspended, the Israeli regime has issued thousands of demolition orders, often demanding self-demolition under the pretext of “lacking permits” and discriminatory zoning and planning laws. The “Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouin in the Negev [Naqab],” functioning as a colonial instrument, carried this forward through the “2019 Strategic Plan for the Regulation of the Negev [Naqab],” with the aims of forcibly displacing 37,000 Palestinians in “scattered illegal” villages and confiscating over 260,000 dunams.

In what seems to be a re-instatment of both the Prawer Plan and Strategic Plan, there was a 400% surge of demolitions in the Naqab in 2024.  On 4 June 2025, 15 homes were demolished in the “unrecognized” Palestinian village of Arab al-Mask displacing 100 Palestinians, and demolitions have continued in the “unrecognised” village of al -Sirr, situated just on the outskirts of Shaqib al-Salam—one of the Israeli-established townships. This  demonstrates the relentless continuity of forcible displacement, dispossession and colonial domination, through the discriminatory zoning and planning laws, recognition status and regardless of whether they are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. 

The West Bank: Fragmentation and Forcible Displacement

Approximately 40,000 Palestinian Bedouin refugees, many displaced from the Naqab during and after the Nakba of 1948, now reside in Area C and “Greater Jerusalem” in the West Bank. Infrastructure, housing, and access to basic services are contingent on permits rarely granted, perpetuating chronic vulnerability and entrenching apartheid and a coercive environment to enable forcible displacement.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently declared the reactivation of the “E1 construction plan,” from 1999, which he declared would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.  The construction of the “E1 colony” was approved on 20 August 2025, reflecting the broader aspiration of colonial expansion outlined in Smotrich’s so-called Decisive Plan: a planned escalation of forcible displacement and the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. The “E1 corridor”, where a large portion of Palestinian Bedouin communities and refugees reside, is not only a site of expulsion but a linchpin in the Israeli regime’s policy to permanently fragment the West Bank by cutting it in half.

The recent ethnic cleansing of the village of Mughayyir al-Deir in the “Ramallah belt” illustrates how this plan is in full force. This is the last Palestinian community on the “Alon Road” east of Ramallah, after seven nearby communities were forcibly displaced in the past three years, to execute the long-term plan of connecting the “Ramallah Belt” colonies with “E1”. The planned “E1” colony around Jerusalem will connect the colonies in the Jordan Valley to Jerusalem, separate Bethlehem from Ramallah and Jericho, and create a contiguous chain of Israeli colonies.

In addition, on 29 March 2025, the Israeli regime approved the final sections of the so-called “Fabric of Life Road,” that would, essentially, completely seal off Jerusalem from the West Bank. This would further sever the West Bank’s geographic continuity, intensifying the threat of forcible displacement for 18 Palestinian Bedouin communities in the area between Jerusalem and Jericho through demolitions for the building of this road. 

Since 7 October 2023, forced displacement, demolitions, and resource cut-offs have intensified, including deprivation of running water in Umm al-Kheir. From January 2024 - June 2025, 5,498 Palestinians have been displaced due to 2684 Israeli-imposed demolitions, in the West Bank including Jerusalem, but not including those displaced by ‘Operation Iron Wall’.

The murder of a Palestinian Bedouin man in Umm al-Kheir from a colonizer attack is one example of the escalated colonizer attacks across the West Bank. Since January 2024, 1133 Palestinians have been displaced in the West Bank from colonizer attacks. Regardless of deliberate obfuscation, the incitement, arming, protection and impunity provided to colonizers clearly indicates that their role constitutes a foundational policy in the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime. In the village of Ein Ayoub such attacks have resulted in the community’s forcible displacement, making it the ninth to be fully ethnically cleansed in the Ramallah Governorate since January 2023.

The geographic and social fragmentation of Palestinian Bedouin—systematically imposed by the Israeli regime through the discriminatory zoning and planning laws, and geographic separation since the Nakba—positions these communities on the frontlines of apartheid and colonial domination. The disruption of interconnected familial and clan networks isolates Palestinian towns and Bedouin communities from one another, intensifying pressures from colonizer attacks and Israeli forces raids and now face the escalation of Israeli regime plans to sever the West Bank further.

Colonization, Apartheid, and the Erasure of Palestinian Presence

In effect, the forcible displacement and depopulation of these communities lays the groundwork for the full imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. While complicit states continue to ruminate over recognition and pay lip service to a two-state solution that the Israeli regime vehemently rejects, they are enabling this forcible displacement with their unwillingness to fulfill their obligations to impose sanctions. Through their inaction, states have greenlighted and advanced the Israeli regime’s ongoing Nakba of Palestinians, regardless of where they currently reside in Mandatory Palestine.

The forcible displacement of Palestinian Bedouin and refugee communities across the West Bank and the Naqab unfold in parallel to the ongoing Israeli genocide and plans to forcibly transfer Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. Together, these reflect tandem strategies of control under a single colonial-apartheid regime, aimed ultimately at carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. These interlinked crimes demonstrate that accountability cannot be piecemeal or selective: the entire Israeli regime must face comprehensive international sanctions and isolation until its dismantlement.