High Court rejects petition to lift lockdown on Jerusalem neighborhood

The High Court of Justice on Tuesday rejected a petition from residents of Ramot to lift the lockdown over their Jerusalem neighborhood.

The court based its conclusion on a similar ruling it had given a week ago in rejecting a petition from Bnei Brak residents who also opposed the shuttering of their city in light of the coronavirus.

Like the Bnei Brak residents, the Ramot locals claimed in their petition that the closure breaches their basic rights, and encourages incitement against the ultra-Orthodox community as a whole.

But the judges responded Tuesday that the decision to shutter Ramot, along with some two dozen other mainly ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem, “was rooted in clear, professional epidemiological considerations and was based on the detailed opinion by Dr. Udi Kleiner, who serves as public health services deputy head at the Health Ministry.”

Ramot is a Jewish neighborhood in the northern part of East Jerusalem. It is the capital’s largest neighborhood and home to some 60,000 residents. Parts, but not all, are predominantly Haredi and roughly 150 coronavirus cases have been identified there.

The court recognized the extreme nature of the ruling, but said the decision to lock down Ramot was due to the high number of confirmed cases there, compared to other neighborhoods and cities.

The judges also dismissed the petitioners request to only shut down parts of the neighborhood, saying that the confirmed cases were too spread out to allow such a policy.

“We found no basis for stating that the government decision was made arbitrarily,” the judges wrote.

Ramot and over 20 other Jerusalem neighborhoods with high coronavirus infection rates went into lockdown this past Sunday afternoon, with around 100 checkpoints set up around the capital.

As of Tuesday morning, Jerusalem led the entire country with 2,258 of the 11,868 cases, and roughly 75% of them being residents of Haredi neighborhoods.

The government approved locking down four of the capital’s seven zones delineated ahead of Passover: Zone 1, which covers northeast Jerusalem; Zone 2, which covers northwest Jerusalem; Zone 3, which covers southwest Jerusalem, and Zone 5, which covers much of the city center.

Residents of neighborhoods under lockdown have been confined to their zones and not able to exit to other areas, except for work, essential medical treatment, funerals of immediate relatives, transferring children between separated parents, court appointments or other essential needs given prior approval by authorities.

The Jerusalem lockdown continued Tuesday evening with residents barred from leaving their neighborhoods — as opposed to citizens in the rest of the country who were barred from leaving their hometowns.

The Jerusalem restrictions matched an eased lockdown in place in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, which had previously been completely locked down.