Tel Sheva

The story

Tel Sheva (Arabic: تل السبع) is a local council in the Southern District, about three kilometers east of Beersheba. The locality was founded in 1968 as the first of the Bedouin localities established in the Negev, within a plan for the establishment of seven localities for the Bedouin of the Negev — Rahat, Tel Sheva, Kuseife, Lakiya, Hura, Segev Shalom and Ar'arat an-Naqab — and was declared a local council in 1984. All of its residents are Muslim Arabs, and according to the estimate of the Central Bureau of Statistics for the end of June 2026, 25,962 residents live in it, and it is among the large localities in the Bedouin sector. The nearness to Beersheba allows its residents to use the infrastructure of the large city and its services — for study, for work and for medicine — and many of the workers in the locality are employed in it. On the other side, between the locality and Beersheba, lies Tel Be'er Sheva: an excavated archaeological site, identified with biblical Beersheba. The two places are neighbors of each other and distinct from each other — the tel is an ancient Israelite city, and Tel Sheva is a local council founded in 1968.

• Bedouin