War in Lebanon reveals lack of shelter for Palestinian citizens of Israel

On October 5, in the Palestinian village of Deir al-Asad, in northern Israel, rockets fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah caused damage and deaths.

At the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost coastal city, doctors said they had received 49 injured people.

While the war between Israel and the Lebanese movement shows no signs of stopping – and Iran and Israel periodically exchange missile fire – the enormous divide between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews is reflected in the lack of shelter and safe places inside Palestinian towns. compared to Israeli Jews.

Murad Ammash is the head of the local village council of Jisr al-Zarqa, a Palestinian town located in the northern Mediterranean coastal plain of Israel.

“In general, since the establishment of the State of Israel, there has been neglect in all areas of life – planning and construction, economy and infrastructure, as if Arab cities were irrelevant,” he told Middle East Eye.

“Maybe only 10 years ago they started talking about Arab society. In Jisr al-Zarqa, today, 16,000 citizens live in the city on an area of ​​1,400 dunams (345 acres). The area includes streets, schools, facilities, institutions and places for housing. In contrast, around 900 citizens live in the neighboring town of Beit Hanania, in an area estimated at 3,000 dunams (740 acres).

Ammash said that in 2006, residents of Jisr al-Zarqa began asking for the area to be expanded. “The development of the structural map took the Ministry of Planning 11 years, due to strong opposition,” he explained.

“More than 64 Jewish neighbors have submitted objections – in contrast, building a structural plan for a Jewish town takes only two years. I see no hope for our village to expand because Israel built the “Highway 2, connecting Haifa and Tel Aviv, which limited the development of the village on the east side,” Ammash said.

Speaking about the situation in the current war, he said: “We face many dangers. The village is surrounded by strategic places, including the gas station, and to the south there is a major power plant.”

What is a shelter?

“When we talk about providing shelter or safe places, we are specifically talking about three types of places,” lawyer Ameer Bisharat, CEO of the National Committee of Heads of Arab Local Authorities in Israel, an organization that represents Palestinian citizens of Israel. .

“The first is shelter inside the house, the second is shelter within an institution affiliated with the local authority – such as schools or community centers – and the third is what is known as a mobile bomb shelter In each of the three types, there are vast gaps between Arab and Jewish cities.

“(Israel’s land policy) discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel and in favor of Jewish citizens”

– Human rights monitoring

Historically, Israel has not imposed any legal requirement on its citizens to build shelter in private homes, not to mention that the homes of most Palestinian citizens of Israel existed before the Nakba and the creation of Israel.

“Actually, we were all here before Israel,” Bisharat said of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who make up nearly 21 percent of the country’s population.

In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War and following Iraq’s Scud missile campaign against Israel, which focused on Tel Aviv and Haifa, civil defense regulations were updated. day, each new apartment built must be attached to a protected residential zone.

Decades of discrimination in land and housing policies have left most of Israel’s Palestinian citizens living in densely populated towns and villages, leading to what Israel considers illegal construction. This means construction works that do not meet required standards and do not include shelters. This may result in the demolition of houses rather than a change in policy.

According to the Arab Center for Alternative Planning, a non-profit organization based in the Galilee, around 30,000 buildings are at risk of demolition and are inhabited by around 130,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.

According to Adalah, the Palestinian legal center in Israel, the land and housing crisis is not the result of specific failures or unintentional negligence. It is “the product of a systematic and deliberate policy pursued by the state since 1948, which regards Palestinian citizens of Israel as enemies and foreigners, while the state continues its program of “Judaization” of all regions of the country.

In another report, Human Rights Watch asserted that Israel’s land policy “discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel and in favor of Jewish citizens, severely restricting Palestinian access to land for housing.” in order to respond to the natural growth of the population.

In 2017, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, approved the “Kaminitz Law,” which Adalah and other human rights organizations said was intended to strengthen “enforcement and criminalization of planning crimes.” and construction”.

The law fails to take into account decades of systematic discrimination in the planning and allocation of state land, which has led to a severe housing crisis in Palestinian towns and villages across Israel.

Since the founding of Israel, the state has not built a single city for its Palestinian citizens.

Emergency disparity

According to a survey conducted in 33 Arab towns in the Galilee, Central Israel and the Negev (Naqab) by the Injaz Center for Professional Arab Local Governance (Injaz), the areas in which Palestinian citizens of Israel live are not equipped to deal with emergency situations. situations.

“Some Arab communities do not have public shelters, while in others the only public shelters are in educational institutions such as schools and kindergartens,” the Injaz report said.

“Furthermore, in some communities there are no shelters within educational institutions and, in some cases, rooms designated as shelters have been transformed into classrooms or laboratories due to a significant shortage of classrooms in Arab society.

There is also a huge disparity in the availability of mobile shelters between Jewish and Palestinian areas of Israel.

In northern cities, where residents have 30 seconds or less to reach a protected area after a missile siren sounds, the division is marked.

In Karmiel, a Jewish town of about 55,000, there are 126 shelters. In Deir al-Asad, where around 14,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live, there is only one shelter and in Nahef, a village slightly larger than Deir al-Asad, there is no shelter at all. .

“Two years ago we were able to obtain two mobile shelters from the Ministry of Housing, which was an almost impossible task”

– Murad Ammash, head of the village council, Jisr al-Zarqa

Nahed Khazem, mayor of the town of Shefa-Amr in Israel’s Northern District, told MEE that at the start of the war they requested 18 mobile shelters.

“It was after a tour we took with the Home Front Command engineer, but they only sent us three shelters. The historic town of Shefa-Amr is made up of old buildings. We need at least 18 shelters They said this is a first batch and in the future we will have additional shelters, but we will not need them after the war,” Khazem said.

“The psychological factor of the presence of these mobile shelters has a major impact on psychological immunity – but we will continue to put pressure on them until the other shelters are made available.”

Sometimes, when shelters are set up, there is no place to accommodate them.

Ammash told MEE that Jisr al-Zarqa needs at least 10 shelters – and at least 60% of its houses are homeless because they are old houses (the village was founded in 1800).

“Even if we wanted to bring a mobile shelter, there is not a single inch of space to place them,” he explained.

“Two years ago, we were able to obtain two mobile shelters from the Ministry of Housing, which was an almost impossible task. We placed one in a courtyard shared by three schools, which affected the well-being of the students, and the second in a courtyard of the sports hall, to the detriment of a space which could be a space for bicycles. We give up services in exchange for other services.

Bedouin Palestinians exposed in the south

In the Negev desert (Naqab), the situation is more dramatic.

Today, more than 300,000 Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel live in the Negev, including about 80,000 in approximately 35 unrecognized villages, according to Adalah.

In these villages, not only are there no shelters, but Israeli air defenses define the territory as an “open zone” because their existence is not recognized. For the Israeli army, this airspace is an ideal place to intercept missiles.

On the day of the Hamas attack, October 7, six children were killed in the Negev by shells falling on their villages, without sirens sounding. In these cities, people live in buildings made of sheet metal panels. There are no concrete buildings. Children run outside during the bombings and hide behind piles of sand.

Huda Abu Obaid, a Palestinian human rights advocate with the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, told MEE that efforts are being made to provide protection, through some civil society organizations, but that this is far from enough.

According to the forum, there are a number of major problems that prevent residents of unknown villages from protecting themselves and their families.

The first is the cost of construction, with residents being among the poorest in all of Israel and unable to afford the estimated cost of a shelter, which is $37,000.

The second is the lack of a permit. The Israeli state does not recognize the existence of the villages, which is why they do not have approved master plans and residents cannot build shelters, even if they have money.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, 18 of the 43 Israeli citizens killed were Palestinian. Today, while the number of deaths is expected to be much higher, the situation is still the same.