The lack of any protection from rockets and missiles for thousands of school children in the unrecognized Negev Bedouin villages must be viewed as nothing less than an emergency situation, said Chairman of the Education Committee Shas MK Yosef Tayeb on November 26 following a visit to three schools and one kindergarten complex in the unrecognized villages of al-Fur’ah, Al Graara and Khirbet Al-Watan in the Negev.
None of the schools had bomb shelters for the staff and children.
According to a press statement released after the visit, the committee members also noted that in the kindergarten they visited there was not even a water supply and the electricity worked only intermittently.
According to the Knesset Research and Information Center 21% of the schools in the Bedouin sector in the Negev which encompass 127 institutions, not including kindergartens, have no protection at all, said the statement. In 48% of the schools in the El Kassum local council there is no protection at all.
Every fifth school in the Bedouin sector is without shelters, the release said.
“Indeed, it does not look good, thousands of students are studying without the minimum protection, it is life threatening,” Tayeb told The Jerusalem Post in written correspondence. “It is an absurd situation that the students have nowhere to run to be protected when rockets are fired at them. There are thousands of children who do not have a safe place when rockets are fired.”
None of this came as a surprise for activists in the Bedouin community who have been sounding the alarm about the lack of bomb shelters for their children for years.
While Tayeb seemed “really frustrated” with the lack of bomb shelters and infrastructure in the schools, the issue is not something which has just emerged now, said Huda Abu Obaid, lobby coordinator for the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality.
“We in the Forum have been speaking about this since 2014. We have gone to court and we keep getting pushed to the side,” she said.
The schools are part of the Education Ministry’s educational system, she said, and the teachers receive their salaries from the ministry and yet they have no shelters for the students and teachers, with the exception of two protected spaces in the village of Rakhamah.
The larger cities such as Rahat, Hura and Segev Shalom have shelters in schools, but not enough, she said. In her home town of Lakiya there is a school with only two protected rooms for all of its 600 students so the children have been going in split shifts, divided between two and three days, when there is school, said Abu Obaid.
Dham Alziadna, whose 17-year-old cousin Aisha is among the Israelis being held captive by Hamas in Gaza, said that like the other parents in his daughter’s school in Rahat, the largest Bedouin town in the Negev, he is deeply disturbed that there is no bomb shelter at all for the school’s 680 students.
“There is no equality now and there wasn’t any equality before,” Alziadna said.
Attia Al Asam, chairman of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages, said since the start of the war on October 7, the parents committee in his own unrecognized village of Abu Talul decided that the safest way to protect their children was simply not to send them to school. That way, he said, there was less chance of having the village’s students die all at once if a rocket did fall on or near the school.
Not that they are actually any safer at home, he said, because there are no safe rooms or bomb shelters anywhere in the villages, but at least the children would not all be congregated in one place at the same time.
Seven Bedouin residents from unrecognized villages, including six children, were killed in rocket attacks at the beginning of the war. Rockets have fallen in recognized settlements, including Rahaṭ, Hura, Lakiya and Segev Shalom, as well as in unrecognized villages.
“We have 13 schools which do not have any shelter or protection,” he said. “That means there are 15,000 students with no protection or shelter. Every time we ask for shelters, we are told (that is not possible) because the schools are in unrecognized villages.”
He has been told that if a new school is built there will be a shelter; however the schools are built in caravans where shelters or safe rooms can’t be built, he said.
More disconcerting is the fact that because the unrecognized villages are considered to be in “open areas” the Iron Dome protection system does not engage when rockets are lobbed in their vicinity, leaving the residents completely vulnerable in every possible way to the rocket attacks, he added.
“The State of Israel in 2023 can’t leave its citizens like this,” Abu Obaid said. First she said the residents of the unrecognized villages should be permitted to build shelters and homes, and the state needs to build shelters in state schools.In an October 25 press release the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev noted that after the start of the war, the Home Front Command distributed 35 mobile bomb shelters that “provide limited protection to certain families” from a community of 304,000 people.
“This is lip service designed to protect the image of the Home Front Command,” the Forum said in the press release. “Now, after 50 days of fighting, NIS 50 million have been allocated for protection, but it is not known if and when the operation will begin.”
Even when the area was under rocket fire, the government was dragging its feet they said.
“Unlike in the past, it is to be hoped that the fact that transportable shelters are now distributed in the name of protection for the Bedouin, this is not just a matter of paying lip service, but a first step towards providing a comprehensive response for the protection problems,” they said.
Tayeb told the Post that the Education Ministry had sent a representative and the regional inspector presented data to the committee. He noted that the committee’s conclusions from the meeting were forwarded to the ministry and the minister personally although the Education Ministry is not directly responsible for shelters in schools, which comes under the responsibility of the Defense Ministry and the Home Front Command.
Tayeb said he intends to initiate a discussion in the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee and will bring the Home Front Command and the Defense Ministry to visit the villages to find a proper solution to provide protection for the students. In addition, he said he would convene a round table of all the government ministries and “will lead the process of building shelters in an intensive way.”
Still, Al Asam said he has heard this kind of talk before. Many committees have come and gone on visits to “study” the situation, he said. And in the end nothing has been done to resolve the simple issue that Bedouin children studying in Israeli schools within rocket range of Gaza, are left without any means of protection – not even siren warnings.
“Everybody has been studying the situation since 2014,” he said. “And nothing has advanced.”
Maybe after the heroic efforts of many Bedouin citizens who endangered their lives to rescue hundreds of Israeli citizens during the Hamas terrorist attack in which 1,200 people were massacred, there will be some changes, he said.“Talking is good, but there has to be action,” Al Asam said. “I would rather that they don’t call us heroes and build us shelters.”