The Israeli District Court in Beersheba rejected land claims on Tuesday by Palestinian residents of their lands in the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in the Negev, one of the most demolished villages in historic Palestine. 

Ending a decades-long legal battle, the judge ruled against the claims by the Palestinian families' defense team that there were defects in the procedure to confiscate their lands in 1954, signed by Israel's then-Finance Minister Levi Eshkol.

The trial centered around the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, which was enacted with the express purpose of legalizing the Israeli expropriation of land from Palestine between 1948 and 1952. 

The judge denied the claim that the villagers left after April 1952 and that the state was not expropriated for "essential purposes," as stipulated by the law. The agricultural use of the land, she claimed, was necessary in the early days of state-building. 

Launched in the seventies and eighties, the trial only began around 15 years ago, and covered some 1,950 dunams of land, according to Haaretz.

From the 1950s until the 1990s, the Palestinian residents cultivated parts of these lands. Most had resettled nearby, but had moved back once the Jewish National Fund (JNF) began a reforestation project, rebuilding the community in order to prevent the seizure of their lands. 

The state filed multiple lawsuits against them, resulting in the authorities razing the structures 200 times. 

The claimants said that the state dispossessed them of their land through "deception, violence, intimidation and bribery."