11% of Tel Aviv residents don’t have adequate access to shelter, says city official

Eleven percent of Tel Aviv residents do not have proper access to a shelter, a representative of the local municipality tells the Knesset Special Committee for Foreign Workers, while locals complain to lawmakers that available shelters in the south of the city are overcrowded and suffer from neglect, vandalism and sanitation issues.

“We have placed 20 portable shelters throughout the city. In Tel Aviv, there are 560 standard protection facilities,” but despite this, “11% of Tel Aviv residents do not have a standard protected space that allows them to reach a shelter within a reasonable time during a siren,” says the Tel Aviv Municipality’s Shai Gateño.

According to Tel Aviv City Council member Shula Keshet, there has been violence in south Tel Aviv’s shelters — while far-right anti-migrant activist Sheffi Paz says that people do not go to the shelters due to the congestion and smell.

Gateño says the city is working on cleaning and maintaining the shelters but lacks the tools to prevent vandalism.

“It is difficult for us to enforce, but we try to carry out repairs and maintenance to maintain basic serviceability of the shelters, but after 10 minutes the situation returns to normal,” he says.

“I received testimonies of cases where elderly residents, women and children were left outside shelters during sirens because the area is home to a high concentration of infiltrators, asylum seekers, and both legal and illegal foreign workers. Since illegal workers are not registered in municipal records, it leads to extreme overcrowding in the shelters,” says committee chairwoman Etty Hava Atia (Likud) — adding that “every human being is entitled to enter a shelter.”

According to a recent state comptroller report, some three million Israelis don’t have access to bomb shelters.