Israel is ‘restoring governance’ to the Negev — by terrorizing Palestinians
With the pretext of a stolen horse, police have turned the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana into a war zone. A fatal shooting was only a matter of time.
It took Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and his police forces less than two weeks to turn a quiet Bedouin village in southern Israel into a bloody battleground.
Tarabin Al-Sana is home to around 1,000 people. Unlike dozens of other Bedouin villages in the Negev (Naqab), it is officially recognized by the state. In the most recent national elections in 2022, over half of the village’s eligible voters did not cast a ballot, but among those who did almost 60 percent voted for the Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet that has not prevented the government from treating them, like all Palestinians, as enemies of the state.
The escalation began with a report of a stolen horse from a farm in the Jewish community of Klahim on Dec. 27. Police who arrived the following day to conduct a search in Tarabin Al-Sana were blocked by residents and forced to retreat. Following this “humiliation,” larger forces arrived. Later, police claim, residents set vehicles on fire in the nearby Jewish communities of Giv’ot Bar and Mishmar Hanegev in protest.
The full-scale police operation, which so far has included no fewer than five visits to the village by Ben Gvir himself, began immediately thereafter. As in the West Bank, the state’s logic in the Negev is limited solely to the use of force, collective punishment, and ever bolder displays of meshilut — a Hebrew word meaning “governance” that has become a euphemism for harassment and collective punishment of Arab citizens.
Accordingly, Tarabin was sealed off from all sides. Police set up a checkpoint at the village’s entrance — which included a command post with Israeli flags — to search every passing vehicle, and blocked all other exits with concrete barriers. Supplies to the local grocery store were halted, effectively putting it out of service, and anyone wishing to enter or leave the village was forced to stand in line and undergo humiliating checks, including being photographed.
Regular police units along with the militarized Border Police and the National Guard (the latter established in 2024 by Ben Gvir) began patrolling the village, searching homes, detaining residents, and firing tear gas. Representatives of government bodies, including the state electricity company and the tax authority, also arrived in the village as part of a broader enforcement operation to find people who are not paying tax or are connecting to electricity illegally.
Israeli police fire tear gas during a visit by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana, southern Israel, December 28, 2025. (Dudu Greenspan/Flash90)
At one point, police nearly shot a Bedouin journalist who was driving in the village as part of his work. The shooting was only averted because the officers noticed that another journalist they recognized was sitting beside him in the car.
But the police could only keep their fingers off the trigger for so long. On the night of Jan. 3, several officers entered the home of Mohammed Hussein Tarabin Al-Sana, a 35-year-old father of six, and shot him in the chest in front of his wife and children.
His brother, Ahmed, spoke to +972 Magazine two days later inside the mourning tent, shortly before the funeral. He described coming home around midnight and seeing police officers approaching his brother’s house, which is part of the same compound. “They arrived quietly, like undercover units,” he recounted. “I gave them my ID and they detained me for 40 minutes. They put me on the ground, tied my hands, and blindfolded me. From what I saw, they were armed with silenced weapons and had their faces covered. Then I heard screaming and crying.”
Mohammed’s 11-year-old son, Hussein, continued the story: “I was asleep, and suddenly I heard someone shouting. My father got up, he was half asleep, and they immediately shot him.” According to Hussein, the officers handcuffed his father while he was bleeding out on the floor, vandalized the house, and then put his father in a car and drove him to the entrance of the village, where he was pronounced dead by medical staff.
‘The police created this situation’
The official police narrative alleges that the officers had come to search the home in connection to the torching of vehicles in nearby villages, and that upon entering, Mohammed had posed a danger to their lives. “Anyone who endangers our police officers and soldiers must be neutralized — and it’s good that this happened,” Ben Gvir said after the incident.
The family categorically denies this version of events. “They say there was intelligence information [relating to Mohammed], and that was the basis on which they acted,” Ahmed said. “But my brother is an older man, he has children, he works in plumbing. What does he have to do with kids throwing stones, or with arson?
Ahmed, brother of the deceased Mohammed Hussein Tarabin Al-Sana, speaking inside the mourning tent in the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana, southern Israel, January 5, 2026. (Oren Ziv)
“They came so Ben Gvir could say they did a good job,” Ahmed continued. “For a week they’ve been firing tear gas every night. Anyone who goes out into the street gets beaten and fined. The police are the ones who created this situation.”
Conveniently, the officers who entered the house were not using body cameras, making it impossible to verify their claim that they had come under “life-threatening danger,” but another officer who stayed outside did have one. Even if they had been in danger, Ahmed said, “they could have shot him in the leg.” (The shooting officer’s lawyer argued that he had acted “professionally” and that the intelligence background — according to which the suspect was dangerous and armed — must be considered when judging the officer’s actions.)
But to residents, local activists, and journalists covering the police operation, it was clear that such a lethal outcome was only a matter of time given the level of incitement by Ben Gvir and senior police officials — and given that the operation had no defined objectives beyond asserting dominance and taking revenge against residents, and achieved no other results.
After the invading forces found not a single weapon, a fact even Ben Gvir admitted, they focused mainly on harassing residents. The stolen horse, which served as the initial pretext for the police incursion into Tarabin Al-Sana, was eventually found in a different Bedouin village (according to Ahmed, in Lakiya, some 10 kilometers away).
The incident is reminiscent of the police killing of Yaqub Abu Al-Qi’an in the nearby Bedouin village of Umm Al-Hiran in 2017. Despite the differing circumstances, in both cases the police tried to whitewash the crime by claiming the victim was a terrorist. And in both cases, the police significantly delayed the arrival of an ambulance to treat the victim.
The funeral of Mohammed Hussein Tarabin Al-Sana, in the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana, southern Israel, January 5, 2026. (Oren Ziv)
At a roundabout at the village’s entrance, residents gathered tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and flares — testament to how the police have transformed the village into an active war zone.
Amir Al-Sana, 42, described the daily scenes in the days leading up to the killing. “They broke everything — windows, doors, [everything was] vandalized. I myself was beaten while sitting with my grandfather by the fire in the shiq [the family’s hospitality tent], for no reason, just to show who has power. They detained children, including my nephews aged 8 and 11. I told them, ‘But these are small children,’ and one officer replied, ‘Even if he’s 2 years old I’ll detain him, and his mother and father too.’
“The police have no objective; they’re carrying out Ben Gvir’s orders,” Amir continued. “These aren’t police officers but criminals, gangs. They drive through the village, throw stun grenades, fire tear gas, and keep driving. There are no confrontations [with residents fighting back.] This is a fascist government — Ben Gvir is a criminal and an inciter.”
‘They turned the village into the West Bank’
Two days before the killing in Tarabin Al-Sana, activists and residents of another nearby Bedouin village, Bir Hadaj, held a protest against the killing of six young residents in recent years by Israeli soldiers, police officers, and civilians. The most recent victim, Ayoub Mohammed Al-Toukhy, was shot in late December by a civilian who was traveling with a soldier near the Egyptian border. It was claimed that the deceased and his cousin were engaged in smuggling, but the cousin was released after no evidence was found.
“The killings are the result of incitement by ministers like Ben Gvir,” Salem Abu Assa, a resident of Bir Hadaj, told +972. “The young man who was killed had simply driven to a gas station to drink a cup of coffee, and when he left, a car followed him and shot him. The shooter was arrested, but later released.”
Another young Bedouin man, 18-year-old Jumaa Danfiri from the unrecognized village of Wadi Al-Na’am, was shot dead in 2024 after climbing the fence surrounding the Jewish community of Retamim. His friends and family say he was “executed” with three shots to the back, rejecting the narrative of the community’s security guards that Danfiri had tried to attack them with a knife (his father claims instead that other young men had persuaded him to break into the community in order to commit a burglary).
Mounted police seen in Tarabin Al-Sana in front of concrete blocks sealing an entrance to the village, southern Israel, January 5, 2026. (Oren Ziv)
As to whether the latest killing will satisfy the desire of Ben Gvir and the rest of the Israeli government for revenge, the answer appears to be no. On Jan. 7, Netanyahu traveled to the Negev for a situational assessment with the heads of the security forces, vowing that his visit would be “the first of many.”
In a video statement, flanked by Ben Gvir and Defense Minister Israel Katz, Netanyahu asserted: “We are returning the Negev to the State of Israel. That means [Jewish] settlement on a scale we’ve never known and regulating the Bedouin population — but, first and foremost, it means restoring law and order. The Negev is running wild. We will rein it in.”
“I don’t know what will happen,” Ahmed, the brother of the victim in Tarabin Al-Sana, said. “They turned the village into the West Bank. We can’t do anything. If there hadn’t been witnesses, there wouldn’t even be an alternative version to the officer’s story. I fear for the children’s future — they need therapy to get out of this nightmare. They want to know what happened, why he was shot for simply opening the door. They’ll grow up with this.”
The Israeli authorities took Mohammed’s body for an autopsy, and released it to the family on Monday. The funeral took place the same day. Police opened the checkpoint at the village entrance for a few hours, but significant forces remained in the area and a helicopter accompanied the funeral procession from the mosque to the cemetery. After the funeral, police reinstated checks at the entrance checkpoint, and officers on horseback and in off-road vehicles patrolled the village, close to the mourning tent.
Munther, a spokesperson for the local tribe, said after the funeral: “From the beginning, we warned that a disaster was going to happen. We approached all the relevant authorities, but in the end this killing happened. No weapons were seized here; there’s nothing to look for. This is collective punishment.
“We are citizens of the State of Israel, citizens in every sense, entitled to everything like any Israeli citizen,” he continued. “I see checkpoints and concrete barriers when I drive toward Hebron and Kiryat Arba, and now we’re seeing this inside the State of Israel and directed toward Israeli citizens. I don’t know where Ben Gvir wants to take this.”
In a statement to +972, Israel Police said that it “continues extensive, proactive, and determined operational activity to enhance security and governance, maintain public order, and strengthen the sense of security alongside enforcement of the rule of law in the village of Tarabin. We will continue to act to strengthen governance and protect all law-abiding citizens.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.