When nightly missile barrages send millions of Israelis into their safe rooms, many don’t have one to go to at all. According to Israel Builders Association President Roni Brik, 56% of households in Israel lack an in-home protected space, equaling well over one million homes.
Though a 1993 law requires that every new home built include a protected space (mamad in Hebrew, an acronym that stands for merchav mugan dirati), the 56% of homes without shelters consist of many that were built before the law was passed. Batnadiv HaKarmi-Weinberg, a mother of four from the Katamonim neighborhood in Jerusalem, said her family does not have an in-home shelter. “In this neighborhood, none of the buildings from before the 70s have shelters,” she said. “This translates into whole streets.”
Getting permission to add a shelter can be complicated and costly. HaKarmi-Weinberg said her family tried to add one to their home earlier this year but was stopped. “At the beginning of the war, they said they were easing the process of getting permission to add a mamad. We hoped to qualify, and started the process of building,” she said. “We were stopped by the municipality because based on some technicality, we didn’t qualify for the expedited process, and needed to go through the whole system, which takes a year minimum, and costs quite a bit of money just to present the paperwork.” She added that the only homes in her area that have shelters are those that have been expanded or that have undergone urban renewal.
According to Eliezer Goldberg of My Israel Home and a zoning specialist and partner in Heter, a Jerusalem-based firm specializing in zoning and building permits, the average time to receive building permits for a mamad is 12-18 months and the total cost for a permit is approximately 50,000 NIS. “The construction can take three to six months and costs approximately 250,000 NIS.” After October 7, the civil defense authorities have allowed a fast-track approval for mamad, he said, but this applies to two-story homes or buildings and has various other limitations.
Every urban renewal project, said Israel Builders Association CEO Igal Slovik in a post on LinkedIn this week, adds a safe room. “The government must recognize urban renewal as a first-rate national mission,” he said. “It’s not just about the economy, not just about upgrading the appearance of the city – but about the security of our citizens.”
Slovik added, “All delay, all bureaucracy, all lack of policy endangers the lives of civilians on the home front.” According to the IDF’s Home Front Command, shelters have proven effective and have “saved tens of thousands of people in recent days.”
Neither the Jerusalem nor Tel Aviv Municipality responded to a request for comment.
For people like HaKarmi-Weinberg, who don’t have protected spaces in their homes, sirens mean running to the basement of an apartment building or to a public shelter, if there is even one nearby. At the beginning of the war, the shelter closest to her was “unusable.” It had “no electricity” and was “filthy.” The next closest one was too far to reach in time before the Home Front Command introduced a system to give Israelis advance warning before sirens sound.
“We spent the first part of the war with the kids under the table, as the dining area was between two inner walls and didn’t have any windows,” said HaKarmi-Weinberg. Now, the family uses a shelter in a local school, which she said “gets more full every night.” They rely on the early warning system to get there in time. In poorer areas, HaKarmi-Weinberg said, there are even fewer public shelters.
HaKarmi-Weinberg thinks not enough people know about this problem facing large swaths of Israelis. “It gets me upset, because people have been victim blaming the Arab family in Tamra that were killed for not having a mamad,” she said. “If their home was built before the Nineties, of course it didn’t have one!” In Tamra, a city near Haifa, four Arab women, a mother, her two daughters, and another relative, were killed Saturday night when an Iranian missile hit their home. Ayman Odeh, chairman of the Hadash-Ta’al party, criticized on Sunday the lack of shelters in Tamra and around the country. “The heavy price of neglect, as well as of war, is now being revealed before our eyes,” he said.
“People who live in newer [and] wealthier areas are completely oblivious about this,” said HaKarmi-Weinberg.
In response to a Facebook post implying that the government has not built sufficient protected spaces in Bedouin areas, Rabbi Joshua Maroof, an educator living in Israel, responded, “You’re spreading misinformation and a false impression here. The ‘government of Israel’ doesn’t provide bomb shelters. They are installed by local governments, or by builders…. It has nothing to do with racism. The local municipalities in these areas are responsible for this and apparently they haven’t prioritized it.
“The reverse of your impression is actually the case – Jewish Israelis are much more focused, even obsessively so, on safety and the protection of life, hence the proliferation of bomb shelters all over the place. I agree the disparity is absolutely terrible and the local officials in these neighborhoods need to be pressured to change it, but you’re pointing fingers in the wrong direction, to be honest.”
For Slovik, these bureaucratic delays are an issue of national security. “We are calling on the government to act and simplify the path to building, faster, more advanced, safer,” he said on LinkedIn. “Let the builders build!”
