A police officer was killed in southern Israel on Wednesday in a ramming attack ahead of protests against the demolition of homes belonging to minority Bedouin Arabs, police said. The suspected Bedouin attacker was shot dead.
The officer killed, 34-year-old Erez Levi, was among police carrying out security for the demolition of 12 buildings in the Negev Desert village of Umm al-Hiran, where the nomadic Bedouin have built structures that Israel’s High Court ruled are illegal. Levi was posthumously promoted to First Sergeant.
A number of other officers were injured when the Bedouin assailant rammed his car into the police officers, Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.
The driver, 50-year-old Ya’akub Musa Abu Al-Qi’an, was a member of an Islamist movement in southern Israel, she said, and police are investigating possible links to ISIS. Abu Al-Qi’an was a teacher in the village.
13-year battle
Adalah, a legal organization representing the Bedouin villagers, disputes the police version of events.
“Eyewitnesses have confirmed that Abu Al-Qi’an was trying to leave the village and lost control of his car only after police fired at him,” Adalah General Director Hassan Jabareen said.
Member of Knesset Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List Party, was also injured in the demonstrations, he told Israel’s Army Radio.
“The police forces came, about 1,000 police officers, and attacked the people in Umm al-Hiran,” he said, in a characterization denied by police.
Umm al-Hiran has been the subject of a 13-year legal battle over the fate of the Bedouin village. Israel’s High Court ruled that the village could be demolished to make way for the construction of the Israeli city of Hiran. The Bedouins had lived in Umm al-Hiran for 60 years after they were initially removed from their native villages in 1948, Jabareen said.
Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel told Israel’s Army Radio the government was negotiating with the Bedouin families until late Tuesday night, offering them replacement lots in the nearby village of Hura.
“We already developed a neighborhood [for the Bedouin families],” said Yair Maayan, CEO of the Bedouin Development and Settlement Authority in the Negev.
“We have there about 150 properties. That’s enough for all the families.”
Some 40 families have already moved from Umm al-Hiran to Hura, Maayan said, while the government continued negotiations with the other families to join them.
“Last night, they came here to sign on this contract to move to Hura, but they canceled it and they didn’t want to do it,” Maayan said.
Israeli authorities have carried out regular demolitions of Bedouin homes they say have been built illegally, according to Human Rights Watch. They say Israel fails to recognize Bedouin villages and makes it incredibly difficult for Bedouin to obtain building permits.
The Bedouin make up around 200,000 of Israel’s population of 8.6 million.
The incident follows a similar attack on January 8 in Jerusalem, when a Palestinian driver plowed a truck into a group of Israeli soldiers, killing four and injuring at least 10 others.
That attacker may have been an ISIS sympathizer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.