As Iran continues to rain down barrages of missiles on Israel, dozens of Bedouin families who live in unrecognized villages in the Negev are still waiting for the state to provide them with adequate fortification. The government has not only failed to provide portable concrete bomb shelters, but has even demolished some of the improvised solutions that residents came up with. Fadi Walidi, who lives in the village of Qasr al-Sir, demolished his own home because he was afraid of being fined by Israeli authorities. “I tore down my own home about three weeks ago,” he says. “When the authorities came, they couldn’t find the house, so they demolished the containers that we have been using as bomb shelters since the outbreak of the war in Gaza. Everyone from the neighborhood went there when there were sirens.”

Now, even those shipping containers have gone. “We don’t know what to do. The nearest school [which has a bomb shelter] is half an hour’s walk away. There’s not enough room in the car for everyone; I can’t take my eight children together.” According to Walidi, a total of 22 homes were razed that day.

Residents of the other two dozen or so unrecognized villages are also trying to find improvised solutions. Ahmed Abu Ghanimeh, who lives in one of the communities adjacent to Route 25, asked the head of the Neve Midbar Regional Council for a mobile concrete shelter – and was turned down. “So, I took a broken-down old minibus from the garage I work at. I got a tractor and we dug a hole and put the bus inside it. We turned it into a bomb shelter. It’s not the most secure, but it’s all we’ve got.”

The minibus, he explains, is not big enough for all his family and when they do use it, they are constantly worried the roof will cave in under the weight of the dirt. “When there’s a rocket siren, we drive to one of the bridges on Route 25 and wait under it. There’s more room there. Sometimes, we get there before the rockets land and sometimes we don’t. Either way, it’s always very crowded.” The rudimentary infrastructure that residents installed has also been destroyed. Abu Ghanimeh says that he has brought concrete sewage pipes to the village – sometimes used as makeshift shelters – but that Israeli authorities “destroyed some of them, too, but not all.”

The "shelter minibus"

‘They covered the mobile shelter in sand and left’

Ibrahim Abu Khaleil, who lives in the village of Umm Matnan, spent around 4,000 shekels on a large concrete pipe, which he planned to convert into an improvised, semi-subterranean bomb shelter. “You could barely get seven or eight people in it. After October 7, they came to demolish the houses. They also tried to demolish the improvised shelter. They uprooted all the trees, but they didn’t manage. Then they covered the mobile shelter in sand and left. Now, we don’t have a shelter of any kind.”

There are currently more than 100,000 people living in unrecognized villages in the Negev. All of them are Israeli citizens. They have no access to basic infrastructure such as water and electricity – and are also being denied physical safety. The vast majority of them – around 85,000 – are not provided with mobile concrete shelters by the state. Indeed, in many cases, authorities prevent them from building their own, since doing so could be a violation of Israel’s strict construction laws.

In the meantime, Walidi and his children have to travel half an hour for a protected space and the Abu Ghanimeh family has to run to a bridge over a freeway every time there’s a rocket siren. For residents of the unrecognized villages in the Negev, the only place left to run, it seems, is underground.

The Israel Lands Authority did not respond to this article before publication.