State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman warned on Tuesday that governance failures in the Negev have worsened since his office’s previous report in 2021, leaving thousands of women and children in polygamous family structures, contractors exposed to protection rackets, state infrastructure repeatedly damaged, and government bodies operating without one authority responsible for the response.
The follow-up audit, conducted from August to December 2024 and published on Tuesday, examined whether the state had corrected failures raised in the 2021 report on governance in the Negev. In most areas, the answer was no.
“The report on governance in the Negev raises extremely serious failures,” Englman said, adding that weak cooperation between government bodies has caused “continued harm to governance.”
He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to treat the issue as a strategic matter and appoint a government authority to lead a multi-system response.
The most striking finding concerned polygamy.
According to the report, 16,256 women are living in polygamous family units in the Negev, a 16% increase from the roughly 14,000 women identified in the previous audit. Of them, 2,423, or 15%, are Palestinian women from the West Bank.
The number of polygamous men also rose by 16%, to 7,159.
The report noted that the proportion of polygamous men among men with children in the Negev fell from 18.1% in 2016 to 15.4% in 2023 but said the phenomenon itself continues and carries severe consequences.
These include economic harm, psychological damage, intra-family conflict, violence against women, harm to children, and the creation of at-risk youth. Its main victims, the comptroller said, are women and children.
Yet enforcement remains minimal.
Between 2022 and 2024, 113 polygamy cases were opened, but the Southern District Attorney’s Office filed only three indictments, despite the establishment of a polygamy unit in the Southern District in October 2024.
The state’s criminal failure
The state’s failure is not only criminal.
The National Insurance Institute pays significant sums to Bedouin families in the Negev through disability allowance dependent supplements, because the definition of “dependents” is applied to two or more women and the children of all the women together.
The report said this can increase allowances by hundreds of percent, but NII representatives told auditors they had no data on the scope of the phenomenon.
The same pattern appeared in tax and environmental enforcement.
The Tax Authority still struggles to locate taxpayers in non-Jewish communities in the Negev because many areas lack regulated street names and house numbers.
At pirate gas stations, it still has no estimate for tax losses, although enforcement has increased. Between January 2020 and August 2024, 90 cases were opened involving lost excise tax totaling NIS 24.98 million.
Ninety-six million shekels were allocated to the Environmental Protection Ministry for Bedouin communities in the Negev for 2022-2026.
Still, the report found continued illegal dumping, waste burning, animal carcass disposal, and blocked stream channels. In 2024, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority collected 355 tons of animal carcasses in the Negev.
In Wadi al-Na’am, an unrecognized Bedouin village, only three-and-a-half kilometers separate schools and kindergartens from the Neot Hovav chemical industrial zone.
Clear signs of weak governance
The report also returned to one of the clearest signs of weak governance: protection money. Englman said contractors are forced to pay large sums for “guarding” that does not actually take place while also facing extortion, threats, theft of equipment and supplies, and fear of filing complaints.
A February 2025 survey by the Contractors and Builders Association in the Tel Aviv and Central District found that 87% of contractors and developers had been asked to pay protection money at construction sites.
Half said projects became more expensive by between NIS 250,000 and NIS 1m., and 75% said contractors were afraid to file complaints.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s office rejected the report as “biased and detached,” saying it distorted the ministry’s work in the Negev.
His office said the number of police officers in the Southern District had risen by 13% since 2022, from 2,782 to 3,212, and that indictments in protection-money cases had increased from 36 in 2022 to 150 today.
Police staffing, however, was one of the areas in which the comptroller found continued gaps.
By the end of 2024, the Segev Shalom and Arara stations were short more than 41 officers combined. The Ayarot station had a shortage of 53 officers, and Rahat was short 21.
Infrastructure damage has also persisted. Mekorot faces an average of 103 infrastructure-damage incidents each year, nearly unchanged from the 105 annual incidents found in the previous report.
In 45 prominent cases, damage to Mekorot infrastructure reached NIS 3.1m.
The Israel Electric Corporation also saw the situation worsen: from January 2020 to July 2024, there were 131 incidents of damage to its infrastructure, with the annual average rising to 29.
Security findings around IDF areas were especially sharp.
Between 2021 and 2023, 1,730 cannabis-destruction operations and 1,855 evacuations were carried out in the firing zones of the National Ground Training Center in Tze’elim.
Around the Nevatim Airbase, the report found a significant rise in shooting near the base, including bullets entering its grounds; in one case, an aircraft wing was hit.
It also warned that residents can still get close enough to observe activity at the base and pointed to a July 2025 indictment of a woman from the dispersed Bedouin population who allegedly collected intelligence for Iranian handlers.
A new phenomenon of drones entering the base area could have strategic consequences, the report said.
The scale of the challenge is growing. By the end of 2023, the Bedouin population in the Negev numbered around 325,000, about 20% of the region’s population.
Between 1995 and 2023, it grew sixfold. Nearly half – 48.6% – were under 17. The dispersed Bedouin population is estimated at 70,000 to 90,000 people.
A lack of reliable data
But the state still lacks reliable data. The Population Authority does not have the tools or resources to verify the true center of life of residency applicants and still faces fictitious documents.
The Land Crossings Authority does not track the departures of Israeli residents, including Bedouin residents of the Negev, to and from the West Bank, making residency checks harder.
In the 2022 census, the response rate was only four percent among residents of the dispersed Bedouin population and around 30% in recognized Bedouin communities.
Above all, the report found, no one is in charge. A ministerial committee on Bedouin settlement and economic development, established in March 2023 and headed by the prime minister, dealt mainly with settlement regulation and did not meaningfully address governance or coordination.
The Ministerial Committee for the Development of the Negev, Galilee, and National Resilience did not convene at all in the two years after it was established.
The report immediately drew political responses, with national elections scheduled for later this year.
New Guard founder and CEO Yoel Zilberman said the report did “not renew anything,” arguing that the organization had warned for two decades that “there is no governance in the Negev.”
He called for the urgent establishment of a government body to “save the Negev,” saying the public pays the price through stolen water, electricity, national infrastructure, drugs, and smuggling.
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett blamed the Netanyahu government, saying that “under Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir-Deri, the Negev has become Palestine.”
Democrats chairman Yair Golan said the report showed that “governance is not achieved through TikTok videos and inflammatory tweets.”
Yisrael Beytenu said it would demand the Public Security Ministry in the next government and push for a combined headquarters against organized crime, dedicated courts, and tougher legislation on illegal weapons.
The comptroller concluded that there is no coordinating government body collecting information, setting policy, resolving disputes between agencies, and overseeing implementation.
In the current fragmented model, he warned, the Negev’s governance crisis has not been brought under control and in some areas has worsened.
For Englman, the report’s conclusion was clear: the Prime Minister’s Office must appoint a government authority with real powers, prepare a multi-year national plan with measurable goals, and ensure that the ministries involved actually implement it.
Without that, the Negev remains a place where the state has enough information to know the problem exists, but not enough coordination, enforcement, or political attention to solve it.