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SDEROT, Israel — The silver Volkswagen minibus had been towed into a sandy lot on the edge of Sderot in southern Israel. Its seats were stained with dried blood and covered in smashed glass. Bullet holes pocked its sides.
In a small recess in the front, a blue Israeli passport gave a clue to one of those who died here.
Date of Birth: 04/12/1972
A search for its owner leads back to Wadi al-Na’am, a Bedouin village 25 miles southeast in the Negev Desert — and an agonizing two-week wait for the body in a community with such a precarious existence that even talking about how the 51-year-old died, or the jets that roar overhead on sorties to bomb Gaza, is a red line.
“The situation today is very, very sensitive,” said Nissem al-Gergawi, the cousin of Sami, whose last name was incorrectly transliterated in his passport. “Every word that we say here can be interpreted differently.”
While the majority of the 1,400 people killed in Hamas’s brutal attack nearly three weeks ago were Israeli Jews, dozens of the victims were Palestinian citizens of Israel. Among them were at least 18 Bedouins, descendants of traditional nomadic communities who now carve out life in Israeli territory, hold Israeli citizenship and still have expansive familial ties that stretch into Gaza.
But in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and revenge in the wake of the attack, frictions inside Israel between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have soared. The atrocities have led to a severe crackdown on freedom of speech among anyone expressing sympathies with Gaza, according to Israeli rights group Adalah, which is representing 74 students who have been suspended from educational institutions for public statements deemed to be “in support of terrorism.”
Maisa Abdel Hadi, an Arab Israeli actress known for her role in the 2013 film “World War Z,” was detained after a perceived pro-Palestinian social media post in the first hours of the attack saying “Let’s go, Berlin style,” an apparent reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She was later released.
Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel — like those in Wadi al-Na’am, a cluster of tin shacks and temporary buildings a mile south of Beersheba — are particularly vulnerable. The settlement is not recognized by the Israeli state and is subject to the constant threat of demolition and eviction.
The village of around 13,000 sits in the shadow of a hulking power plant. In a cruel irony, its legal status means the houses here are not hooked up to the grid. Similar unrecognized villages are home to more than a third of around 300,000 Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel who live across the Negev, the sparsely populated expanse that sweeps down to the border with Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, said Huda Abu Obaid, a Bedouin rights activist.
The Bedouin community is caught between two worlds, she said. “We are Israeli citizens, but also we have families in the Gaza Strip. We know people there, I have friends there,” she said. But most people are trying to keep their heads down, she said.
“People are very, very scared,” she added. “People are trying to keep quiet, not to write and not to talk about things.”
Of the Bedouin who have died during and in the wake of Hamas’s attack, most were killed in rocket strikes from which they have no protection. A few, like Gergawi, were gunned down as militants took up sniping positions on intersections and caused havoc on city streets in their mission to kill and kidnap.
In Wadi al-Na’am, the wails of the warning sirens for the power station can be heard from the village when rockets fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad threaten to strike. But the lack of building permits in the village mean there is nowhere to shelter. Buildings are flimsy.
“In the eyes of the state, everything is illegal,” said Nissem, driving past a group of children playing around the concrete blocks that root an electricity pylon in place. Inspectors “come, sometimes demolish, sometimes leave it. It’s a mess.”
Now is not the time to discuss it, he said. The family would rather focus on Gergawi, he said, and they are still reeling from the loss.
“We took this very hard,” Nissem said, as the family sat in mourning on the edge of the village, serving black coffee and dates to the stream of visitors who have come to pay their respects. A father of 30 children with three different mothers, his presence leaves a gaping hole, the family said.
“In the Bedouin community, the firstborn son is responsible for his siblings, for his children, for the whole family,” Nissem said. “He and his brothers and their families are about 80 or 90 people. The situation is very hard for the family.”
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On the morning of Oct. 7, Gergawi woke as normal at around 4 a.m. to ferry Gazan workers who have permits to work in Israel from their accommodations to farms near the border.
“The workers he was transporting were Arab and his employer was Jewish,” said Nissem. “Whether someone was Jewish or Arab, Christian or Muslim, there was no difference to Sami when it came to race, religion or sex. He respected everyone alike.”
Gergawi’s brother, Khalil, tried to call him when he heard the news of the rocket strikes. He got no answer and kept trying.
Soon, like many of the families of the victims, he’d get the news he dreaded through social media when he saw a video of a silver VW Transporter on a corpse-strewn road in Sderot. The body of one man slumps out onto the road.
The camera moves inside to show a figure slumped at the steering wheel. “It doesn’t matter who murdered, it was murder … murder,” Nissem said.
The city of Sderot was overrun by militants on the day of the attack. Armed groups took over the city’s police station. It took more than a week for the municipality to remove the bullet-riddled cars from the city streets. The police station is now completely razed after being severely damaged in the battle to eject the Hamas gunmen.
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The city could not provide figures on the number of people killed on the bus Gergawi was driving. On the back seat next to a bloodied buckle lay another identity card for a temporary worker from Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip, which is now under fierce Israeli bombardment.
In total more than 5,000 Palestinian’s have died in Israel’s response to Hamas’s murderous rampage.
“He was murdered in cold blood with no guilt of his own,” said Nissem, who said his cousin was a man of peace. “He hadn’t harmed anyone. He made an honest living. Even in war in Islam, you cannot murder a working man, women, children, the elderly, uproot trees, to burn a home. It is forbidden.”
They tried to reach the area where Nissem’s cousin was killed. The roads were blocked. When they arrived home, they set up the mourning tent straight away even though they were yet to receive a body.
The family staged around-the-clock in shifts at a tent erected by the military for families waiting for news.
“We had all seen that he was murdered, and we thought it would be an hour or two, a day or two, until we get the body,” said Nissem.
But day after day went by, and they started to fear that it could have been taken back to Gaza.
“At one point, we thought that we wouldn’t find the body,” he said. So when it was finally handed over, on the two-week anniversary of the attack, it was bittersweet. “It closed a circle,” said Nissem.
They buried him the same day in a cemetery in the neighboring village.
“The entire country still hasn’t digested what has happened,” he said.
Ilan Ben Zion in Wadi al-Na’am contributed to this report.