NAQAB, December 24, 2025 (WAFA) - The Israeli authorities demolished on Wednesday the al-Araqib village in the Naqab desert in the south of Israel for the 244th time since the year 2010, according to reports.
Local sources said that Israeli authorities raided the village earlier today, demolished homes and tents, and detained one of the residents.
This marks the tenth time that Israeli authorities have demolished the tents and dwellings sheltering the residents of Al-‘Araqib since the beginning of 2025, following 11 demolitions in 2024, 11 in 2023, 15 in 2022, and 14 in 2021, as part of repeated attempts to pressure the village’s residents, drive them into despair, and forcibly displace them from their land.
Every time the village is demolished under the pretext of illegal construction, its Palestinian residents return to the land and rebuild their homes in a clear rejection of the Israeli attempt to dislodge them from the land where they lived for decades.
The unrecognized village of al-Araqib is home to 22 families, comprising approximately 86 people, who live off raising livestock and farming.
In the 1970s, residents were able to prove, through legal means, their right to own 1,250 dunums of land out of thousands of dunums in the al-Araqib area. Yet, they have not been allowed to live in their village in peace.
In addition to Al-‘Araqib, unrecognized Arab villages in the Naqab are subjected to ongoing plans of uprooting and displacement. Palestinians in the Naqab recognize that the purpose of these restrictive measures and systematic persecution, carried out under the guise of the Israeli judiciary and the pretext of “unlicensed construction,” is to erode their land ownership claims and assert control over the Arab presence in the region.
Unrecognized Arab villages in the Naqab are facing a humanitarian catastrophe in every sense of the word, as these communities are denied the most basic necessities of life due to policies of injustice, discrimination, and neglect pursued by successive Israeli governments against their residents, solely because they are Arabs who have insisted on remaining on their land and rejected plans of uprooting and displacement.
T.R.
