A-Zaarura

The story

A-Zaarura is an unrecognized Bedouin village east of Kuseife, beside Route 80, with some 2,600 souls in it. It is named after the a-zaarura shrub, which serves for the preparation of medicines. In its area are water wells and ancient dams. Bedouin settlement in the area was documented already at the end of the Ottoman period. In the period of the British Mandate a police station named Ras ez-Zuweira was set up here, in order to guard the road that led from Beersheba to Ein Hutzuv; in the population census of 1931 there were counted in the area of the police station eleven inhabited houses with forty-six souls in them. The children of the village study in Kuseife or in the neighboring village of al-Fura'a, and for health services its residents travel to Kuseife. In 2005 the Adalah organization submitted a petition to the High Court of Justice demanding that the Ministry of Education transport the children of the village to kindergartens in the neighboring localities or set up kindergartens in the village itself. The water arrives through some ten connection points of the Mekorot company on the main road, from which the residents draw pipes; the electricity the residents supply to themselves with solar panels and generators. The investigator appointed to examine the objections to the Beersheba Metropolis plan recommended allowing recognition of the village. Since 2004 Rotem Amfert has sought to establish here an open phosphate mine, and in February 2019 the High Court of Justice issued an order nisi in the matter and directed the return of the plan to the National Planning and Building Council.

• Bedouin
• Communities
• Arad