The fact that the villages are not connected to the national grid represents one of the worst problems because it violates the right of all the villages’ residents to get proper health care in general and of chronic patients, children and the elderly in particular. Without electricity, the villages’ residents cannot refrigerate foods and medications or conduct reasonable lifestyle such as heating and cooling the house in a safe way, proper hygiene, or the use of electrical medical equipment needed for healing.

Despite the fact that the right to have access to good quality drinking water appears in many conventions, the state of Israel does not connect the Unrecognized Villages to the national water grid. As a result, residents are forced to travel long distances and spend a lot of money to store water in containers or to accept self made connections that provide a very low pressure of water.

The villages’ residents live in shacks or in temporary structures with a tin roof. Such living conditions do not provide any insulation and tend to be humid during the winter and extremely hot during the summer. Without electricity, there is no option for air-conditioning and there are occasional cases of hyperthermia.

Despite the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior for waste disposal in the villages, it does not do so. The residents are forced to either burn trash or transfer it to a distant site. Not removing the trash creates a variety of sanitation hazards including dirt, odors, insects, rats and other rodents. The burning of trash releases dangerous chemical fumes in the air.

Since 2002, Israel Land Administration has been spraying fields cultivated by Arab-Bedouins in the Negev, claiming that they have invaded state’s lands. In many cases, the legal status of the lands that were being sprayed has not been settled. The spraying has been done despite the fact that houses and livestock were nearby. PHR-Israel and a few residents who were harmed, together with other organizations, submitted through Adalla a petition to the High Court of Justice to terminate the spraying. The petition 2887/04 was supported by a medical opinion prepared by PHR-Israel member Professor Eliyahu Richter, Head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Hebrew University.