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When the Israeli Bedouin village of Tarabin al-Sana backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party in the last elections, they expected their lives would improve. Three years later, the small community in the Negev has been left stunned after a two-week crackdown during which police shot dead a 36-year-old father of six.Israeli police set up roadblocks, fired tear gas and searched homes in scenes reminiscent of military raids on Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank.Tarabin’s residents, however, are Israeli citizens.At the last national elections in 2022, some 60 percent of the village’s voters cast their ballots for Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party.”What happened in Tarabin in the last two weeks has never happened before,” tribal representative and local council member Abed Tarabin told AFP.”We are citizens of the state; we didn’t do anything to warrant the move they made,” he added, accusing the police of having “punished the entire village”.The crackdown began on December 27 when police made arrests in the village over what they said were violent incidents and stolen weapons.After accusing residents of retaliatory acts of vehicle arson in a nearby Jewish community, officers encircled Tarabin.Residents say forces withdrew on January 11, but that police were still present. Two young children wandered aimlessly past a pile of twisted charred metal, crushed breeze blocks and a burnt-out car next to the dilapidated village school.”The children here are traumatised,” said resident Mundher Tarabin, 36, adding that some were so badly affected they still hadn’t gone back to school days later. – ‘People supported him’ -Israel’s impoverished and long-marginalised Bedouin are descendants of shepherds who once roamed freely far beyond the country’s current borders.Today there are about 300,000 Bedouin living in Israel, and like its other Arab minorities, they often complain of discrimination.Campaigning in 2021, Netanyahu visited Tarabin and drank coffee with local leaders to woo Arab voters.Behind a camel pen on the edge of the village, Mundher Tarabin showed where Netanyahu had made a speech.”He said he’d make the Negev a better place,” Tarabin said.”And people supported him.”Tarabin said he had himself voted for Netanyahu’s Likud, but would not do so again in elections this year.Faced with poor infrastructure and opportunities, Bedouin grapple with high levels of crime within their communities.Police said the Tarabin raid was part of a wider operation called “New Order” aimed at “removing illegal weapons from criminal circulation, disrupting criminal activity and enforcing the law”.”Dozens of suspects were arrested or fined for a range of offences, including illegal weapons possession, drug offences, outstanding warrants and traffic-related violations,” they said.Visiting the Negev on January 7, Netanyahu warned that crime in the region was “out of control”.”We will rein it in,” he vowed, and said this would involve Jewish settlement on an unprecedented scale as well as “arrangements for the Bedouin residents”.- ‘Incitement’ -Bedouin in the Negev live in a mixture of communities recognised and not recognised by the government. Many say the police fail to effectively address crime. “The state has always known how to come and deal with crime. But what we see today is not dealing with crime — it’s incitement,” Mundher Tarabin said. He accused far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — who spearheaded the Tarabin operation and visited the village five times in two weeks — of using the raid as a campaign stunt. “They want to show the right wing that they are doing their job,” agreed Huda Abu Obaid, a resident of Lakiya, a nearby Bedouin town where police placed temporary roadblocks in November.Abu Obaid said Ben Gvir had visited multiple times to record social media videos.Abu Obaid — who heads the NGO Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality — said the key to stopping the cycle of violence was investing in education and employment. But she was fearful the state was attempting to scapegoat the Bedouin. “If today they are closing the towns, and they are using the police, using weapons against the people, I’m not sure what they will do in the next few years.”

Iran’s foreign minister on Friday launched a furious tirade against Volodymyr Zelensky after the Ukrainian president commented in Davos that the deadly crackdown on protests in the Islamic republic showed that if authorities “kill enough people” they stay in power.Zelensky, whose country has been fighting the full-scale Russian invasion for almost four years, said in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Thursday that if Iran’s clerical leadership was able to remain in power, it was a “clear signal to every bully”.Russian President Vladimir Putin is an ally of the Islamic republic’s leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and last week held telephone talks with President Masoud Pezeshkian, with both sides agreeing to ramp up bilateral ties.Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded to Zelensky’s comments with a broadside of accusations and claims in an English-language post on X, saying the Ukrainian leader had been “rinsing American and European taxpayers to fill the pockets of his corrupt generals”. “The world has had enough of Confused Clowns, Mr Zelensky,” he said, in apparent reference to the Ukrainian leader’s previous career as a wildly-successful comedian and comic actor.”Unlike your foreign-backed and mercenary-infested military, we Iranians know how to defend ourselves and have no need to beg foreigners for help,” he added.Foreigners are fighting in the Ukrainian army but make up only a tiny percentage of the armed forces.- ‘Drowned in blood’ -Kyiv and the West accuse Iran of providing drones and ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine. Tehran has repeatedly denied sending any weapons to Russia.In his speech in Davos, Zelensky appeared to cite the response to the protests as another example of Western inaction in the face of aggression.”There was so much talk about the protests in Iran — but they drowned in blood. The world has not helped enough the Iranian people, it has stood aside,” he said, speaking in English.Zelensky noted that the start of the protests coincided with the Christmas and New Year holidays in Europe. “By the time politicians came back to work and started forming a position, the ayatollah has already killed thousands.””What will Iran become after this bloodshed? If the regime survives, it sends a clear signal to every bully — kill enough people, and you stay in power,” he said.Iranian authorities have said well over 3,000 people were killed in the protests but have blamed the violence on “rioters” backed by the United States and Israel.Rights groups however say the toll is far higher and could be as much as 20,000, adding that confirming the numbers is hugely impeded by the now two-week shutdown of the internet in Iran.NGOs, including Amnesty International, have accused security forces of deliberately firing on protesters to suppress the demonstrations, which have now petered out.

President Donald Trump said a US “armada” was heading toward the Gulf and that Washington was watching Iran closely, even after downplaying the prospect of imminent military action and saying Tehran appeared interested in talks.Trump has repeatedly left open the option of new military action against Iran after Washington backed and joined Israel’s 12-day war in June aimed at degrading Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.The prospect of immediate American action seemed to recede in recent days, with both sides insisting on giving diplomacy a chance.On his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the president told reporters on Air Force One the United States was sending a “massive fleet” toward Iran “just in case.””We’re watching Iran,” he said. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”Addressing the WEF on Thursday, Trump said the United States attacked Iranian uranium enrichment sites last year to prevent Tehran from making a nuclear weapon. Iran denies its nuclear programme is aimed at seeking the bomb.”Can’t let that happen,” Trump said, adding: “And Iran does want to talk, and we’ll talk.”The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had also warned Washington Thursday that the force had its “finger on the trigger.”A fortnight of protests starting in late December shook Iran’s clerical leadership under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but the movement has petered out in the face of a crackdown that activists say killed thousands, accompanied by an unprecedented internet blackout.Last week, Trump pulled back from a threat to strike Iran over its deadly crackdown on the protests after the White House said Tehran had halted planned executions of demonstrators.In a standoff marked by seesawing rhetoric, Trump had on Tuesday warned Iran’s leaders the United States would “wipe them off the face of this Earth” if there was any attack on his life in response to a strike targeting Khamenei.Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in a speech Thursday accused the United States and Israel of stoking the protests as a “cowardly revenge… for the defeat in the 12-Day War”.- ‘Legitimate targets’ -Guards commander General Mohammad Pakpour warned Israel and the United States “to avoid any miscalculations” and learn from “what they learned in the 12-day imposed war, so that they do not face a more painful and regrettable fate”.”The Islamic  Revolutionary Guard Corps and dear Iran have their finger on the trigger, more prepared than ever, ready to carry out the orders and measures of the supreme commander-in-chief,” he was quoted by state television on the IRGC’s national day.Activists accuse the Guards of playing a frontline role in the deadly crackdown on protests.The group is sanctioned as a terrorist entity by countries including Australia, Canada and the United States, and campaigners have long urged similar moves from the EU and Britain.General Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, head of Iran’s joint command headquarters, meanwhile warned that if America attacked, “all US interests, bases and centres of influence” would be “legitimate targets” for Iranian forces.- Real toll? -Giving their first official toll from the protests, Iranian authorities on Wednesday said 3,117 people were killed.The statement from Iran’s foundation for martyrs and veterans distinguished between “martyrs”, members of security forces or innocent bystanders, and what it called US-backed “rioters”.It said 2,427 of the dead were “martyrs”.Pezeshkian said Thursday that protest was “the natural right of citizens” but a distinction had to be drawn between protesters whose “hands are stained with the blood of innocent people”.Rights groups say the heavy toll stems from security forces firing directly on protesters and that the actual number of dead could be far higher, even more than 20,000.Efforts to confirm the scale of the toll have been hampered by a national internet shutdown, with monitor NetBlocks saying Thursday the blackout had surpassed “two full weeks”.”All the evidence gradually emerging from inside Iran shows that the real number of people killed in the protests is far higher than the official figure,” said the director of the Iran Human Rights NGO Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, saying the authorities’ toll has “no credibility whatsoever”.IHR says it has verified at least 3,428 deaths. Another NGO, US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), has documented 4,902 deaths.HRANA says at least 26,541 people have been arrested. On Thursday, state TV announced more than 200 more arrests in provinces including Kermanshah in the west and Isfahan in central Iran.