JERUSALEM –

Israeli authorities on Thursday completed the demolition of a village at the heart of a years-long struggle by members of the country’s Bedouin Arab minority against resettlement plans.

Israel says hundreds of villagers were squatting on state-owned land and that authorities offered them plots of land in a neighboring Bedouin commune. Residents of the village of Umm al-Hiran accuse authorities of forcibly displacing them so that land can be developed for Israel’s Jewish majority.

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the move by posting on X that there has been a 400 percent increase in the issuance of such demolition orders so far This year.

“Proud to lead a strong policy of demolition of illegal houses in the Negev! he wrote.

Israeli bulldozers entered the village of 400 residents in the Negev desert on Thursday and demolished the last building still standing – the mosque.

Residents had dismantled their makeshift homes earlier this week to avoid having to pay fees to the state to demolish them.

Videos shared by activists and police showed an excavator destroying the mosque, its dome collapsing in a heap on the ground.

But Hanoch, an Israeli activist who witnessed the demolition, said drones and helicopters flew over the village while seven police bulldozers demolished what remained of the village.

“After the mosque was demolished, the rest of the heavy machinery started destroying again the rest of the houses, which were already demolished,” Hanoch explained.

Three members of the village council were arrested early Thursday before the demolitions began, said Nati Yefet, a spokeswoman for the Negev Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages.

The council accused Israel of clearing land for the construction of a Jewish community.

“The destruction of Umm al-Hiran to make way for the Dror settlement is part of a systematic population replacement program in the Negev,” the statement said. Four more Bedouin villages were demolished this year as part of a broader plan to raze unrecognized villages and build new Jewish communities in their place, the statement said.

The council said 14 villages in the region, home to some 9,000 Bedouins, are at risk of demolition.

Umm al-Hiran was founded in its current location in 1956, after the Israeli army displaced the village’s clan several times following the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel.

Israel’s more than 200,000 Bedouins are the poorest members of the country’s Arab minority, which also includes urban Christian and Muslim communities.

Israel’s Arab population, which makes up about 20 percent of the country’s 10 million people, are eligible voting citizens but often suffer discrimination and tend to identify with Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.