Woman dies in fire in makeshift apartment in Jerusalem storage unit

A woman was killed in a fire in Jerusalem’s Malha neighborhood, police said Wednesday morning.

According to Hebrew media reports, the woman was in her thirties and was living in a makeshift apartment in a storage unit at a parking lot on Haya’en Street in the capital.

She was declared dead at the scene.

Police have opened an investigation.

“The incident is definitely a common occurrence that is troubling us — converting parking spaces and warehouses into housing units,” Nissim Twito, commander of the Fire and Rescue Services in Jerusalem, told the Walla news site.

“This phenomenon certainly creates a death trap for several reasons — these are spaces with no safety arrangements without ventilation and usually with very low ceilings, and very quickly the space is filled with smoke.”

Separately, a 35-year-old woman was seriously injured in a fire in an apartment on the fourth floor of a building on Bechor Sheetrit Street in the southern city of Beersheba.

She was taken by paramedics from the Magen David Adom ambulance service to Soroka Medical Center for treatment for smoke inhalation.