JERUSALEM, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- The Jerusalem municipality initially approved a plan to evacuate 120 Bedouins from their east Jerusalem village in order to build a waste landfill.
The landfill is set to be stretched over a valley between the city and the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim over 120 acres. The objectors charge the real aim of the plan is to create a continual territorial land stretch between east Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements.
The plan has earned initial approval from the country's committee of regional planning and building over the past week and opponents can currently seek to submit their objections to it.
In Israel, there are nearly 200,000 Bedouins, a desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group divided into clans and tribes, half of which reside in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel.
Most of them became Israeli citizens upon the state's inception in 1948, but several tribes were displaced and others remained without Israeli citizenship within Palestinian-populated areas.
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