Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the establishment of five new towns in the Negev region at a Cabinet meeting on Sunday. He proposed that one of the communities be named after Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, a police officer from Meitar, near Beersheva, who died fighting terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023.
The prime minister suggested the name “Rananim” for the town. Gvili’s body is the last held by terrorists in the Gaza Strip. He served with the Israel Police Special Patrol Unit.
“We said we would not only work for settlement, we would work to restore law and order to the south. We aren’t weakening on this. It’s a fundamental part of the deep change we must make in the south of the country. There will not be a Wild South here,” Netanyahu said, referring to the lawlessness, smuggling and organized crime stemming mainly from the region’s large Bedouin community.
Construction and Housing Minister Haim Katz of Likud said that the government is implementing the 2022 decision to establish five new rural community settlements and an employment zone along Route 25 between Beersheva and Dimona and the Beersheva-Arad axis.
The plan aims to strengthen the Negev periphery by boosting demographic growth, expanding housing options, reducing socioeconomic gaps and reinforcing governance.
"[O]n the exposed route from Beersheva to Dimona you see only illegal construction by Bedouin. Suddenly you will see Jewish settlement that will bring order, I hope, to the area,” Katz said.
Minister of Settlements and National Missions Orit Strook of the Religious Zionism Party told the Cabinet that the blank space on the maps seems like a void but in fact it is a void filled with crime, illegal construction and other problems that follow from a lack of enforcement and governance.
She said that normally establishing a new community takes decades, “or it doesn’t happen at all,” but she instructed her office to expedite the process, which required battling the general view that small towns aren’t needed because people can be housed in apartment buildings in cities.
The downside to that approach is that large areas are lost, Strook said. “Therefore, our approach is the opposite, and we are also now advancing a bill in the Knesset that will greatly shorten the time it takes to establish communities.
“Settlement is security,” Strook said. “We are building a defensive wall of settlement for the State of Israel.”
