Israeli forces knocked down on Tuesday the residential tents of the Araqeeb community in Negev area, inside the Green Line, for the 170th consecutive time.

Israeli police arrested member of the village’s local defense committee Aziz Touri, before they released him later on.  Residential tents were uprooted and shacks dismantled, displacing dozens of Palestinian Bedouins.

Some 240,000 Palestinian Arabs live in the Negev desert, half of whom live in villages and residential communities, some of which have been in place for hundreds of years. Israel does not recognize their ownership of the land and refuses to provide them with basic services such as water and electricity.

Villagers insist on remaining in their village and rebuilding after every demolition process.

Like the 34 other Bedouin villages “unrecognized” by Israel, al-Araqeeb does not receive any services from the Israeli government and is constantly subjected to threats of expulsion and home demolition.

These “unrecognized” villages were established in the Negev soon after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, following the creation of the state of Israel, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes and made refugees.