Hostage’s Release Shines a Spotlight on Israel’s Bedouins

Farhan al-Qadi, the hostage rescued from southern Gaza on Tuesday, is a member of the Bedouin, an Arab community marginalized by Israel that suffered painful losses in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.

During the attack, at least 17 Bedouin were killed, including by Hamas rocket fire, and eight others were abducted. But little attention has been focused on their plight — a reflection of their peripheral status in Israel.

Tens of thousands of Bedouin live in unrecognized villages in the Negev desert, an upended triangle of arid land that borders Gaza and extends through southern Israel.The villages have long suffered from a lack of basic services, including running water and electricity. When Hamas fires rockets into southern Israel, Jewish communities largely can take cover in nearby bomb shelters, while dozens of these villages lack them.

Mr. al-Qadi’s address is in Rahat, a township established by Israel, but his home is actually in an unrecognized village, according to Fayez Abu Suheiban, a relative and the former mayor of Rahat. When he was abducted, Mr. al-Qadi was working as an unarmed guard at a kibbutz in southern Israel, Mr. Abu Suheiban said.

The Bedouin were historically a seminomadic group. But in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, most were forced out of the Negev desert or fled to other parts of the region.

Israeli authorities concentrated those who remained in a smaller area of the desert, and later built seven meager townships for them, which Israeli experts said was an effort to corral a society that highly values independence into the structures of a modern nation-state. Today, there are roughly 300,000 Bedouin in the Negev, many of them under 18, about one-third of whom live in the unrecognized villages.