With few shelters but plenty of roadblocks, East Jerusalem Arabs squeezed by war

Like his neighbors in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of a-Tur, Hussein does not have a bomb shelter in his apartment, and there isn’t one in his building either. When sirens warn of an Iranian missile attack, he takes cover in the stairwell of his apartment building, where he is often the only one doing so.

“I don’t take things like this lightly — it’s missiles. There are people who say I’m foolish, ask why I do this, but it’s not a game,” Hussein told The Times of Israel Monday while driving through a-Tur’s rolling hills.

Iranian missile barrages targeting Israel on a nightly basis since Friday have also put some 400,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem under threat, with the vast majority lacking any form of shelter to protect them.

Most homes in Arab neighborhoods do not have reinforced safe rooms, and public shelters, largely located in recently built municipal schools, are few and far between.

On top of a glaring lack of shelters, East Jerusalemites face growing restrictions on their movement since the war’s start as security forces close Arab neighborhoods to traffic. The move is seemingly due to concerns of unrest, though police have declined to comment.

Driving toward a-Tur’s main commercial drag, Hussein was forced to take a detour around the neighborhood’s main road, which police had blocked off with concrete blocks. The detour took him past a makeshift checkpoint manned by two Border Police officers.

Hussein said that the two officers, who were stopping drivers headed in the opposite direction, had begun operating the checkpoint earlier that morning.

Gimme shelter

For many in Jerusalem, finding a safe space in case of a missile attack is no more complicated than entering a reinforced room built into most new apartments, or entering a shared underground shelter in the basement of apartment buildings.

While such spaces are common throughout Jewish parts of Jerusalem, they are much rarer in Arab parts of East Jerusalem, as are public shelters.

Israeli law requires new apartments to be built with protected rooms, but homes built without permits are unlikely to follow the guidelines, leaving most without safe spaces.

About half of the 280,000 East Jerusalem Palestinians who reside on the Israeli side of the West Bank security barrier, which bisects Arab parts of the city, live in unauthorized homes, according to the urban planning organization Bimkom.

Illegal building is rampant in Arab East Jerusalem, experts say, due to Israeli policies limiting permits and high demand among Palestinians seeking to retain residency in the city, which confers them with more Israeli rights than West Bank Palestinians.

“For years, Israeli policy aimed to limit housing units, which meant limiting the number of Palestinians living in the city,” said Michal Braier, an urban planner with Bimkom. “That didn’t work, because East Jerusalemites need to reside in the city to maintain their residency status. Illegal construction is a result of the impossibility of building legally.”

In addition, many East Jerusalemites live in older homes, which are also not outfitted with safe rooms.

The situation in neighborhoods located beyond the wall — but still within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries — is even more dire.

“Beyond the separation barrier, all the new and high-rise buildings were constructed without oversight or permits. They have no reinforced rooms. A friend of mine who lives in Kafr Aqab says that during a siren, they run to the hallway because that’s all they have,” Braier said.

A spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality said the city has 452 shelters in schools, and another 190 public shelters scattered throughout the city, as well as 57 protected underground parking lots, and 18 accessible above-ground shelters for people with mobility disabilities.

Of those, only 60 are in Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, all of them in schools.

Tamer, a resident of Kafr Aqab, a sprawling Palestinian neighborhood in the city’s far north, called the municipality’s instructions telling residents to shelter in schools “nonsense.” When a siren sounds, those living in the center of Kafr Aqab have less than two minutes to make the 20-minute drive to the nearest shelter, some six kilometers (3.7 miles) away.

“How do you expect thousands of people to get to the schools? You’re not talking about a handful of residents; this is a town with around 120,000 people,” he said.

According to Braier, the schools containing shelters listed on the municipality’s website aren’t spread out evenly across East Jerusalem.

“They’re clustered — in Beit Hanina, there’s an area, and in Issawiy, there’s a concentration of schools. So if you live nearby, great. If not, you’re out of luck,” she said.

Isshaq, a resident of Beit Hanina, said that people without a protected room, feeling helpless, walk around the house or go outside to the street. He estimated that around 90% of the neighborhood doesn’t have any form of shelter.

“There are old houses, and there are new houses built without permits. People are scared — you know what kind of explosions we’re hearing? We’re not used to this,” he said. “My wife turns off the TV at home so the kids won’t see the images of destruction [from strikes elsewhere].”

According to Braier, before the rocket threat to Jerusalem became a daily reality on October 7, 2023, Arab East Jerusalemites were not even informed of where school shelters were.

“The list of schools on the municipality’s website, the ones East Jerusalem residents can supposedly go to, didn’t exist before October 7. After that, they suddenly realized no one had a clue where the shelters were, so they put a list together,” she said.

Though providing the information and translating it into Arabic marked “a step forward,” Braier stressed that the municipality frequently slipped up in translation and often used street names unfamiliar to locals, leading to confusion.

“It’s the same list of problems we always see in East Jerusalem. Only here, we’re talking about people’s lives,” she said.

Neighborhood roadblocks, heavy traffic

The disparities between Arab and Jewish areas of Jerusalem have been made even starker by recent moves made by police to obstruct entry and exit points to some Palestinian neighborhoods with concrete blocks, which they have done on a routine basis since fighting began Friday.

In a-Tur, residents and activists said police blocked off a road on Saturday after a few locals falsely reported missile damage in the neighborhood, then proceeded to throw stones at officers when they came to the scene.

Jehad Abusneineh, an a-Tur resident, decried the blockages as a form of collective punishment.

“This situation is bad already,” he said. “We already have narrow streets, and not so many exits and entrances,” leading to heavy traffic in the neighborhood.

The move has prompted residents to fear that emergency services will have difficulty reaching affected neighborhoods — among them a-Tur and Shuafat — in the event of an actual missile impact.

“They’re not thinking about the risks. If a missile hits, Magen David Adom and other life-saving services won’t be able to enter, and people won’t be able to evacuate the wounded,” said one resident of Sheikh Jarrah.

Since being placed on Saturday, the roadblocks in a-Tur “cut off the major entrances to the neighborhood, so that thousands of people need to do a very large detour to enter and exit in a car,” said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at the Israeli civil rights group Ir Amim. “Of course, if someone needs an ambulance, this becomes a very big problem.”

In response to an inquiry from Ir Amim on the matter, the police stated that the move was aimed at “protecting public safety and security.”

Law enforcement said that “situational assessments conducted by relevant professional bodies” determined “that the security situation necessitates the placement of roadblocks in order to deal with incidents of violence and public disturbances.”

Police did not respond to requests for comment by The Times of Israel.

Recent days have also seen an increased police presence in Palestinian neighborhoods. Clashes between residents and security forces have broken out in several neighborhoods, including Shuafat, Issawiya and Wadi al-Joz.

Tatarsky contended that the roadblocks and increased patrols stemmed from the authorities’ tendency to “see [East Jerusalem] residents as a threat.”

On Monday night, 13-year-old Iyas Abu Mufreh and 22-year-old Uday Abu Jum’a sustained serious injuries after being shot with expanding bullets by an Israeli police sniper, according to local Palestinian media.

A Border Police statement confirmed that officers were posted in the area at the time and that residents lit fireworks and threw a Molotov cocktail at authorities.

“Feeling that their lives were in danger, the police forces opened fire at the assailants in order to neutralize them,” said a police spokesman regarding the incident.

Palestinian witnesses and activists with Ir Amim said, however, that police shot at the two unprovoked.

Footage from that night shows the sniper positioned on the roof of a building as a group of people further down the street gather in the middle of the road, presumably after the shooting took place.

According to Palestinian accounts, Abu Mufreh sustained serious nerve damage and a complete bone fracture in his arm, requiring a four-hour surgery. Abu Jum’a suffered a serious wound to his back.