GENEVA (3 June 2022) – UN human rights experts* today urged Israel to stop the eviction and demolition of a Bedouin village in Israel that will forcibly displace hundreds of residents in a bid to expand Jewish-only settlements. “Thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Naqab are facing threats of eviction to make way for more Jewish-only towns, military bases, and other major infrastructure projects that exclude the Bedouin people and their development interests,” they warned. The experts expressed particular concern that approximately 500 Bedouin residents in the village of Ras Jrabah, unrecognized by Israeli authorities, are facing an imminent threat of eviction. The Israel Land Authority (ILA) filed 10 eviction lawsuits against 127 residents of Ras Jrabah and their families in May 2019. Israel is seeking to force out the residents, pushing them into segregated, impoverished Bedouin-only towns in order to expand the primarily-Jewish city of Dimona. On 22 and 23 May 2022, the Beer Sheva Magistrates’ Court held hearings in the case. “While the State calls the residents ‘trespassers’, in fact, members of the Bedouin minority have lived there for generations,” the experts said. They called on Israeli authorities to immediately halt evictions and housing demolitions which could cause irreparable damage to the traditional way of life of the Bedouins, their livelihoods, their cultural practices, and the relationship to their land. The issue of forced evictions targeting the Bedouin minority in Israel and demolitions and destruction of their property, has been raised by UN experts in the past, including calls to “refrain and desist from actively pursuing segregationist policies and practices, resulting in the violation of the right to adequate housing and the prohibition of discrimination”. The experts expressed regret that the Government of Israel has yet to respond to these communications and continues to deny the basic human rights of the Bedouin minority. The experts are in dialogue with the Government of Israel on this issue. *The experts: Mr. Fernand de Varennes was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues by the Human Rights Council in June 2017. He is tasked to promote the implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, among other things. Mr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing by the Human Rights Council in May 2020. A lawyer by training, he is an expert on many areas of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights, the UN system, and the human rights challenges posed by development activities. Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity. Country Page: Israel For more information and media requests please contact: Christel Mobech (+41 22 917 9995 / mobech@un.org) For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts, please contact Jeremy Laurence (+ 41 79 444 7578 / jeremy.laurence@un.org). Follow news related to the UN’s independent human rights experts on Twitter @UN_SPExperts.