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Isabelle Humphries reports from Palestine on the plight of the forgotten Bedouin children of the Negev desert and the deliberate environmental and health hazards they face, lest the world remember them this World Health Day.
10-year-old Asad Qraini survived the Israeli assault on his home in Jenin camp, only to be killed by stepping on unexploded ammunition in the destroyed camp that the Israelis left behind. Five boys in Gaza from the same family were also killed when they stumbled on an explosive device left by the Israeli military. The boys, aged between 6 and 14, were killed on their way to school by a device planted in a sand dune, claimed by Israeli military sources to have been a trap for ‘militants’.
The international community has failed to protect Palestinian children from the devastating effects of war. Children have been killed as bystanders to assassinations, not to mention those who have been deliberately targeted. But it is not only direct Israeli military attack that creates a dangerous environment for children to grow up in.
Growing Up ‘Unrecognized’
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| Carcinogenic zinc roofs result in burns for the children |
The infant mortality rate in the community (19 per 1000) is four times higher than in the Jewish sector. Chemical dumping from Israeli industry occurs close to residential areas. Parents bring their children to the local hospital with first, second and third degree burns from the zinc roofs of their makeshift homes, which can reach temperatures of up to 55? C degrees. The Israeli Ministry of Environment warns that zinc is a dangerous, cancer causing building material, yet Israel will not let Arabs in the officially ‘unrecognized’ villages build permanent stone structures to enable them to bring up their children in a safer environment.
You might be surprised to find out that I am not talking about Palestinian villages in the West Bank or Gaza, but the situation for Palestinian Bedouin children living in the unrecognized villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert. The Negev is on the other side of the Green Line, in the area that Israel occupied in 1948. Technically, the 120,000 Bedouin of the Negev are Israeli citizens and carry Israeli passports, but this makes little difference in terms of Israeli policy. Like the rest of the one million strong Palestinian community living inside Israel, the Israeli government fails to provide a safe environment for Bedouin citizens in which to bring up the new generation.
Israel has built a power station next to the unrecognized Bedouin village of Wadi Al Naim. “The children of Wadi Al Naim get the side effects of radiation, not the benefits of electricity,” Maha Qupty told IslamOnline. Qupty is the Development Director of the Regional Council for the Palestinian Bedouin of the Unrecognized Villages in the Negev (RCUV).
The Regional Council, (an NGO and not an official municipality), represents the 70,000 plus Bedouin (half of the Bedouin in the Negev) of the 45 villages that Israel has failed to ‘recognize’, even though many have been there since before 1948. Many of these villages do not have access to such basic services as piped water and the electricity network.
Because Bedouin children from these villages are growing up in a residential area that is officially ‘illegal’, the Israeli government does nothing to protect the health and livelihood of the community. On the contrary, Israeli policy serves to make life as difficult and as uncomfortable as possible, in order to encourage Bedouin to leave and move to one of the seven ‘official’ townships: large ghetto towns created to hold the Bedouin and cut them off from their natural environment.
Human Rights Violations
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Scene from a Bedouin village Photo by PHR-Israel
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Bedouin children in the Negev, while holding Israeli passports, are brought up in an environment completely different from their Israeli-Jewish peers, whether in Tel Aviv or a rural settlement in the West Bank. The head of the children’s department at the Negev Soroka hospital claims that 90% of child patients are Bedouin, even though they only represent 25% of the Negev population.
The RCUV is working in conjunction with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)-Israel, to complete a comprehensive survey of ten villages to present evidence of the poor health in the community, evidence that is likely to demonstrate a direct connection with the environment in which they live.
Large numbers of children come to medical clinics and hospitals suffering from respiratory diseases, burning eyes, dizziness and other complaints that would seem to be directly related to the fact that they live in a highly polluted environment. At the beginning of April, the government again sent airplanes to spray Bedouin crops with poison, to kill existing crops and to prevent them farming on ‘illegal’ land. What kind of effect will such crop poison have on children playing in the area? Why is there a higher miscarriage rate among Bedouin women?
Further investigation is essential to protect the health of this vulnerable community. PHR-Israel notes that dangerous chemicals and gases emitted from the Ramat Hovav industrial area are affecting the lives of some 4000 Bedouin living in the area. “Little is known of the long term effects of these conditions…a prime example of the blatant disregard towards the lives of the people in the ‘unrecognized villages,’” states the PHR-Israel website.
The medical human rights group also draws attention to the lack of sanitary conditions, sewage infrastructure and waste disposal, which have a direct relationship to the health of residents. “Garbage piles are a source of diseases and insects, in addition to poisonous creatures including venomous snakes. The inhabitants gather the garbage and burn it every once in awhile, however the smoke caused by the garbage can be harmful and most unpleasant. In situations like these, sudden winds are liable to cause uncontrolled fires to break out.” And if there is a fire, government fire services rarely reach the site on time.
Deadly Development
Israel is making the living environment and conditions for the Bedouin so difficult that it can be inferred that the government hopes that the Bedouins will eventually be forced to move on, even if they are not forcibly transferred. The Israeli development plan for the Negev, pioneered by Sharon whose own ranch is in the Negev, will implement the building of new industrial and chemical plants and military firing zones to be completed by 2020. The development of the living conditions for the Negev Bedouin, needless to say, is not a part of the plan for the region.
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“The children of Wadi Al Naim get the side effects of radiation, not the benefits of electricity.”
Maha Qupty
Devpt. Director of RCUV
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Poor quality of water and insufficient wastewater systems also contribute to the poor health of Bedouin children. For example, two open sewers from the Israeli settlement of Arad flow past the neighboring Bedouin villages. While the whole Bedouin community is vulnerable to environmental pollution, children are weaker than adults and succumb quicker to illness. Children also require safer surroundings in which to fully develop and grow. There are no public recreation areas in the Bedouin villages, so it is impossible for parents to monitor that children are playing in clean areas. Water-related sickness such as diarrhea or more dangerous diseases such as typhoid are prevalent amongst the Bedouin community.
Nuclear Negev
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Picture of the Dimona reactor dome taken by Mordechai Vanunu
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Bedouin of unrecognized villages are excluded from many official Israeli statistics due to their ‘illegal’ locations, but there is another aspect of environment-related health in the Negev that the government will go to any lengths to see that it is not investigated.
It is well known that Israel’s nuclear program is developed in the Negev from Dimona. While Israel is not recognized by the West as a nuclear-armed country, no official investigation and protection of citizens who might be exposed to the dangers of nuclear radiation or accident is carried out.
A recent BBC documentary investigated the kidnapping and solitary confinement of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower. As part of the research, the journalist tried to investigate incidents of cancer amongst Israeli workers at the plant. She met a blank and refusals at every turn, owing to the Israeli security cover-up of activities on the site. If Israel still will not allow public investigation of cancer among Jewish workers, it will be even more difficult to address the issue of the link between cancer amongst the Bedouin in the area of nuclear activity.
If a Bedouin parent needs to take a child to receive medical attention, even in an emergency, they could have to travel up to 35km to the nearest clinic using their own form of transport. Israeli ambulances will not come to unrecognized Bedouin villages, and even in ‘recognized’ towns, streets are so poorly paved that ambulances will not come directly to many houses.
So it is not only the Palestinian children of the West Bank and Gaza who are adversely affected by Israeli action and development policy of their local environment. For those who claim that Israel’s disruption and damage to the lives of Palestinian children is a sad and inevitable part of its security policy, a look at the way Bedouin children, officially Israeli citizens, are treated is a clear indication of deliberate discrimination against non-Jewish children. It is worth noting that, usually for financial reasons, some Bedouin actually serve in the Israeli army. Despite poverty and discrimination, Bedouin rarely take part in anti-government Palestinian political activity inside the 1948 borders. Even this demonstration of ‘loyalty’ from the Bedouin community to Israel, fails to win the protection of the Jewish state.
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