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Featured image: A Palestinian man can be seen demolishing his home on his wedding day after he was forced to do so by Israeli forces [Quds TV/Twitter]

Israeli occupation police on Saturday evening forced a Palestinian man in the Negev to demolish his home on his wedding day, Arab48 reported.

Faisal Abu-Binniyah in Wadi Al-Naam village was forced to raze the property in which he planned to start his new family, his brother Jalal said, leaving “him without an alternative”.

“The demolition of my brother’s house ended our happiness at his marriage as we were subject to repeated raids by Israeli police and repeated threats to pay high fines if we did not demolish the house,” Jalal told Arab48.

Jalal described the measures of the Israeli police against his family as a “revenge policy”, stating that this is “intentionally planned against Arabs.”

Wadi Al-Naam is the largest unrecognised Arab villages in the Negev with a population estimated to be more than 13,000.

Most of the residents in this village were forced out of their homes by the Israeli occupation forces in 1953. Like all other unrecognized villages they lack the basic infrastructure including access to running water and connection to the national grid.

According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), more than half of the approximately 160,000 Bedouins in the Negev reside in unrecognised villages.

The unrecognised Bedouin villages were established in the Negev soon after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war following the creation of the State of Israel.

Right groups say that the demolition of unrecognised Bedouin villages is a central Israeli policy aimed at removing the indigenous Palestinian population from the Negev and transferring them to government-zoned townships to make room for the expansion of Jewish Israeli communities.