Population
According to the official data provided by the Israel Land Administration in 2007, some 60 per cent of the Negev Bedouin live in seven permanent state-planned townships, such as Rahat, Tel as-Sabi, Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom), Ar'arat an-Naqab, Kuseife, Lakiya and Hura, and the rest (40 per cent) - "in illegal homes spread over hundreds of thousands of dunams". Nevertheless, a number of unrecognized villages were recognized by the state (such as al-Sayyid), and the new ones were built (such as Tirabin al-Sana) totaling 12 (not including the previous seven townships). A newly created regional council of Abu Basma has united these localities. So as of today (September 2012) there is no updated official statistics on the number of Bedouin living outside the government-planned and officially recognized communities.
Around 2007 the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) said that Bedouin in unrecognized villages constitute half of the total Negev Bedouin population. But on their new site there is no notion of the current population of the unrecognized villages.
According to the Human Rights Watch data (2008), approximately half of Bedouin citizens of Israel (85,000 out of 170,000) live in 39 such villages. But mentioning these numbers they rely upon the information provided in 2006 by the Israeli NGO Adva Center. Other sources count 45 and 46 unrecognized villages.
Read more about this topic: Unrecognized Bedouin Villages In Israel
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)