The Negev District police, with the assistance of the Border Police, began an offensive this morning against the ongoing Bedouin encroachment and squatting on state lands in the south. The operation includes spraying poison on fields planted by trespassers on state lands, as well as the enforcement of orders against illegally-built squatter structures. Bedouin in the Negev have regularly ignored hundreds of such orders; the police rarely enforce them. The Bedouin have taken over some 800,000 dunams of state lands in the past years and built 30,000 illegal structures.