East Jerusalem Left Unprotected amid War

When air raid sirens sound in the neighboring Israeli settlement of Gilo, Palestinian resident Zakaria Abu al-Halaweh goes with his wife and young daughter to the lobby floor of their apartment building.

There isn’t a siren system or a single bomb shelter in Zakaria’s East Jerusalem neighborhood of Bir ‘Awna, located beyond the Israeli-built Separation Wall that snakes in and around this side of the city (see Neighborhoods beyond the Wall). Instead, the family huddles on the ground floor until the thud of rocket fire shaking the building subsides.

“We try to go to the safest part of our apartment, but it’s not easy,” Zakaria told Jerusalem Story.1 “We don’t know even what to do, to be honest. It’s very scary.”

This is just one example of what hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across East Jerusalem experience when Israel is at war. With a near complete absence of shelters and reinforced safe rooms throughout East Jerusalem, Palestinians resort to hiding in stairwells or standing in areas of their homes that are farthest away from windows when missiles are aiming for the city.

“We only stand, pray, and ask God to save us,” Munir Zughayer, chairman of the neighborhood residents committee who lives in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Kufr ‘Aqab, also located behind the Separation Wall, told Jerusalem Story.2

East Jerusalem only has three public shelters3 compared to the 186 in Jewish West Jerusalem.4 Two of those shelters, though, are located in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and the other is in the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina. The Western side of the city has 329 school-based shelters while East Jerusalem has about 60, mostly concentrated in the northern East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Shu‘fat and Beit Hanina.5

“These shelters are in municipal schools, and also mainly in the newer schools,” Dr. Michal Brier from the Israeli planning rights group Bimkom told Jerusalem Story.6

Brier, who recently worked on a position paper Bimkom released about Israel’s neglect of its Arab population in the area of protective infrastructure, explained that the shelters in Palestinian schools are often clustered together, because the Jerusalem Municipality has only allocated limited land designated for building schools in East Jerusalem, where the city’s Palestinians are largely concentrated and where severe overcrowding exists in the schools that serve them (see Ir Amim Issues New Report on Education in East Jerusalem, Tracking Severe Challenges Facing Schools There).

“East Jerusalem neighborhoods were historically villages that were annexed to the city by the Israelis [in 1967],” Brier said (see What Is Jerusalem?). “For a long time there was no planning at all, and when [Israel] started planning, it was actually limiting development . . . mainly meant to restrict the number of Palestinians living in Jerusalem. So [the municipality] zoned very little land for public infrastructure like schools and community centers.”

“It’s a long-term neglect of planning that leads to these sorts of problems,” Brier added.

During Israel’s war with Iran lasting from June 13 to 25, 2025, the Jerusalem Municipality turned 45 underground parking lots into protected spaces—only in Jewish West Jerusalem, however.7 The municipality also erected 17 mobile shelters, but again, only in West Jerusalem.8

“There is a much larger system here and at the end of the day, we see it when the siren goes off,” Braier said in an interview with The National.9

“Mobile shelters have been put in illegal outposts in the West Bank,” Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, an organization monitoring Jerusalem policy, told Jerusalem Story.10

Outposts, the most preliminary form of Jewish settlements, are generally established without official government approval, meaning they are illegal under Israeli law, although they are increasingly being retroactively legalized by the state (see Settlements).11

“It’s something that’s very telling of the current policy,” Tatarsky said. “Very few people [are] in an outpost, yet here in East Jerusalem, you have in a neighborhood tens of thousands of [Palestinian] people, and the state has failed to provide shelter for them. And they don’t even bother bringing [in] a mobile shelter.”

The situation is even more dangerous in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the wall, such as Kufr ‘Aqab, Bir ‘Awna, and Shu‘fat refugee camp (see Neighborhoods beyond the Wall). Here, shelters aren’t scarce; they simply don’t exist.

“We’re talking about more than 130,000 Palestinians who have zero shelter,” Rami Saleh, the Jerusalem branch director of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, told Jerusalem Story.14

When Zakaria inquired with the Jerusalem Municipality about the lack of protected areas for Bir ‘Awna, the city employees responded with confusion.

“It took me 15 minutes just to explain where my neighborhood is located. Even for those working in the municipality, it’s the first time they hear about this area,” Zakaria said.

He was transferred between different municipal phone lines, with one representative telling him that Bir ‘Awna is part of the “Israeli municipality of Beit Jala,” which doesn’t exist because the West Bank town of Beit Jala is managed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and another stating that Bir ‘Awna belongs to the Israeli settlement bloc of Gush Etzion.

“They didn’t even know what to answer me. I tried just to explain that we are paying taxes to the Jerusalem Municipality, and Bir ‘Awna falls within the Jerusalem Municipality, but this didn’t make sense to them,” Zakaria said. “It’s very clear that there is a huge apartheid for us. We belong to the Jerusalem Municipality, but unfortunately, they do not give us any services.”

In the Kufr ‘Aqab and Shu‘fat refugee camps, rows of high-rise towers that were built without permits also present a looming threat to residents.

“All of the buildings do not have any proper infrastructure [and were built] without any proper monitoring from engineers,” Saleh said.

“If any missile or rocket will hit beside those buildings, the buildings will collapse . . . It’ll be a real catastrophe.”