Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to prevent the Israeli demolition of the Arab village of Hiran in the Negev in order to replace it with an Israeli settler village.

Officials from our Embassy in Tel Aviv continue to follow the cases of Um Il Hiran and Ateer closely. They have been in contact with the Adalah Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (who wrote the report ‘Nomads Against their Will’, issued in 2011) and they have briefed us on the legal updates since then. We understand the hardships facing the Bedouins of Um il Hiran and Ateer and continue to study the situation in order to inform any future lobbying.

Officials have also been in contact with several other organisations that work within the Bedouin community, such as Itach-Maaki and the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation – Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (AJEEC-NISPED), to evaluate the best sort of support we can offer the Bedouin community in the Naqab/Negev.