Riad El Shtiwi opens a folder of documents in Arabic and Hebrew, compiled over decades, to explain how he wound up here, while his wife Widad and four of their children (who were born in Israel) are in Gaza, facing hunger and bombings.
In 2005, Israeli authorities relocated El Shtiwi and another 68 families pertaining to the Armilat - a Bedouin clan originally from the northern coast of the Egyptian peninsula of the Sinai - to Tel Arad.
It was built by Israeli military authorities in the 1970s (when they controlled Gaza as well as the Sinai after their victory in the Six-Day War of 1967) to compensate them for having appropriated their land to build the Jewish settlement of Yamit.
When Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1987, part of the clan returned to the Sinai. Riad's family left for Dahaniya, where there was running water, electricity and a half hectare of land per person.
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