When rockets and missiles are fired at Israel, sirens go off and Ilan Amit takes his family to the public shelter conveniently located four stories beneath his street in Jerusalem.
“When I’m down there, I feel completely safe,” he told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
“My thoughts are with my friends and colleagues and partners who don’t have a bomb shelter where they live — not a public one, not one in their house, no ways to protect themselves at all.”
Most municipalities in Israel have several public bomb shelters, but many Arab-majority communities lack that same infrastructure — especially desert settlements that Israel doesn’t recognize as legal.
As Israel engages in wars in Gaza and Iran, advocates like Amit are highlighting that security disparity, and working to fix it.
Amit is co-CEO of the non-profit Arab-Jewish Center for Empowerment, Equality, and Co-operation (AJEEC), which is deploying mobile bomb shelters made of concrete to the communities that need them most. But, ultimately, he says it’s a problem that won’t be fixed without significant government investment.
Asked for comment, Israel’s defence ministry directed questions to the Israeli Defence Force, which did not respond to CBC before deadline.
As of Tuesday, a fragile ceasefire took hold between Israel and Iran. But just a couple weeks ago, Iranian missiles struck the northern town of Tamra and killed a family of four.
Among them were Nidal Abu Al Heija’s sister.
When a phone alert sounded on June 14 to warn of Iranian missiles flying towards Tamra, Abu Al Heija called his sister to tell her to take shelter with her daughters, but no one answered. After the alert, he rushed to the area where she lived. The street was full of people and littered with debris.
“I was asking people what happened and someone, he just said to me ‘Oh, Nidal’. He didn’t know what to say. And then the other one says, ‘It’s your own sister’s house’,” Abu Al Heija told Reuters four days after the strike.
The house had taken a direct hit.
“Darkness, dust, smell of bomb, something I don’t want to remember,” said Abu Al Heija. “I was just going there shouting ‘Noura! Noura! Shada! Hala!’ And then unfortunately I saw her coming, people holding her, with no breath.”
Known to her family as Noura, Manar Abu Al Heija Katib, 45, and two of her daughters, Shada, 20, and Hala, 13, were killed, along with Manar’s sister-in-law, Manar Diab Katib, 41.
The only survivors were Manar Abu Al Heija Katib’s husband, Raja Katib, and their third daughter, Razan.
Unlike many Arab households, the Katibs had reinforced safe rooms on the top floor of their house, in keeping with Israeli construction standards put in place in the 1990s.
But it wasn’t enough to protect them. Part of the roof had collapsed, crushing the top floor. Windows and walls were blasted out and rubble tumbled down the side of the house.
On the heels of the tragedy, Tamra Mayor Musa Abu Rumi pointed out that his town — which has 37,000 residents — doesn’t have any public shelters.
“The government has never financed the construction of shelters in our town, because they have other priorities,” he told CNN.
The problem is not new.
The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), an independent research centre, noted in a recent report that people in Tamra raised alarms about the lack of public bomb shelters after a Hezbollah rocket strike injured three people there in October 2024.
Since then, it says, “Israel has continued to wage a sustained military campaign on several fronts,” while the security discrepancies in Arab communities “remain unaddressed.”
In fact, the IDI and other advocacy organizations say there has been little to no progress on this front since a 2018 State Comptroller’s report in Israel found that 60 out of 71 Arab municipalities in Israel have no public shelters.
“This situation is not only immoral but also unconstitutional and grossly violates the right to equality, and the state’s obligations to protect the right to life, protection and security,” Abir Joubran, an attorney for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said in a press release issued after the Tamra strike.
The report also found that 46 per cent of Israel’s Arab citizens live in houses without any reinforced safe rooms, compared to 26 per cent for the wider population.
Amit says the situation is even worse for the roughly 150,000 Arabs who live in Bedouin villages that are not recognized by the Israeli government.
“Those are villages in the Negev, in a desert in the south of Israel, that have zero shelters, no public shelters, no domestic shelters, no mobile bomb shelters, no way to protect themselves while missiles are falling,” Amit said.
“And unfortunately, that population … lives adjacent to Israeli air bases, which means that the Iranian rockets are focusing precisely on those areas. That’s the population we’re worried about.”
AJEEC runs an emergency response centre to address the specific needs of unrecognized villages.
“We’re currently focusing on purchasing mobile bomb shelters,” Amit said. “Those are huge pieces of concrete, basically, and placing them next to clinics and schools.”
Before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants, Amit says Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system wasn’t covering huge swaths of Bedouin communities. Because Israel does not officially recognize the villages, the system saw those parts of the map as open agricultural areas, he said.
“Today, we’re in a bit of a different situation. The military is intercepting those ballistic missiles coming down on the Negev in those areas, but there’s so much debris coming down on those villages,” he said.
“Those are burning pieces of metal coming down from the sky from the interception of those missiles. And we are seeing more and more hits in houses, people that are being injured.”
Amit has been addressing Israel’s parliament, writing op-eds in local newspapers, and reaching out to lawmakers to push Israel to bridge the security gap between Arab and non-Arab populations.
While the current government is not always easy to work with, he says he believes they are making progress.
Still, he says, there’s “a lot to do.”
“There are billions of shekels that must be allocated in order to narrow those gaps,” he said. “Those are people’s lives. This is a privilege. This is the basic right of the citizens of Israel.”
