Bedouin residents of a key area of the occupied West Bank near East Jerusalem under threat from an Israeli displacement order filed a legal objection to the plan on Wednesday.
The objection comes shortly after Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich separately ordered the displacement of Khan Al Ahmar, one of the villages included in the objection, in response to the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant against him.
Residents of Khan Al Amar filed the complaint with Israeli rights group Bimkom, alongside Palestinian residents of other West Bank villages in the area that Israel intends to displace to urban sites, as it accelerates its illegal settlement programme in the territory.
More than 200 people signed the objection, including many Bedouin residents of Khan Al Ahmar and other communities, arguing that the Israeli move “seeks to forcibly transfer Bedouin communities from the rural open areas east of Jerusalem into a dense urban environment incompatible with their way of life", Bimkom said in a press release.
The communities have long been face with state-backed moves to remove them, but the matter took on a new urgency on Tuesday when Mr Smotrich announced his order to empty Khan Al Ahmar in response to what he said was an ICC warrant that was issued against him.
At a media conference on Tuesday, the minister called the warrant “a declaration of war – and in the face of a declaration of war, we will respond in kind”. He added: “I promise all our enemies, this is just the beginning.”
Bedouin in the occupied West Bank are among the Palestinians most affected by Israel’s rapidly expanding settlements, which have developed at unprecedented rates under the current government. Many live in spartan and isolated shepherding communities, in areas prized by settlers. They are often the victims of attacks by settlers and the military.
Alon Cohen-Lifshitz of Bimkom said: “Instead of allowing communities to remain where they are and develop according to their way of life, the [Israeli] state has spent years attempting to concentrate them in dense urban settings in order to clear the surrounding area.
“Khan Al Ahmar has demonstrated for years that the displacement of Palestinian communities in the West Bank is not simply the result of settler violence from below, but part of a policy driven from above,” he added.
“Smotrich and his allies have embarked on a race against time to reshape the West Bank through the legalisation of outposts, settlement expansion, and the displacement of some of its smallest and most vulnerable communities.”
Khan Al Ahmar, home to about 250 Bedouin Palestinian residents, is in Area C of the West Bank over which Israel has full security and civil control under the Oslo Accords.
Israeli attempts to expel the residents and grab their land have been the subject of court battles and media coverage, long before Israel’s current ultranationalist government rapidly accelerated the pace of the country’s illegal settlement programme.
The small stretch of land is of major strategic importance because it is a corridor between the north and south of the West Bank and close to East Jerusalem, which, in the eyes of most of the international community, should one day become a Palestinian state.
