‘We want to stay’

‘Ahlam Khalil, 19, rejects the future that the Israeli government has laid out for her.
“We want to stay. The government is trying to take from us all that we love. How do you think we will feel? It will be the hardest thing to face,” she says, sitting on her porch in the Bedouin village of Atir in the Naqab desert in the south of present-day Israel.
Following more than a decade of litigation, the Israeli high court ruled in May last year that the state is legally authorized to demolish Atir along with neighboring Umm al-Hiran.
Atir will become an extension of the planted forest of Yatir, while Umm al-Hiran will become the Jewish settlement of “Hiran.”’
Read more: ‘We want to stay’