‘We’re filling the gap that the state is supposed to fill’: new site maps bomb shelters in Arab localities
Houses in Tamra, an Arab-Israeli town, that were destroyed by Iranian ballistic missiles killing four people in June 2025
Linda Dayan reports in Haaretz on 23 June 2025:
When Israelis received the alert that their airplanes had struck targets in Iran, along with instructions to remain close to shelters in the middle of the night, online searches in Hebrew for shelters spiked significantly.
When you search the words “miklat” in Hebrew, “malja’a” in Arabic or “bomb shelter,” it presents you with a map of your region and the locations of fortified public safe rooms. But panning around that map shows serious disparities. In Nof Hagalil, a Jewish town in northern Israel’s Galilee region, there are almost 20 such pins on the map. In neighboring Nazareth, there are none.
“When the war broke out on Thursday night, the Arab community woke up unprepared for a war of the magnitude of one with Iran,” says Mahdi Kabaha, a lawyer and software developer from Barta’a in central Israel who now lives in Haifa. Not only were there not enough suitable shelters in Arab-majority areas, but there was little information available on the ones that do exist.
“If you’re in Tel Aviv, and you search in Waze or Google Maps for a shelter, they’ll show you the one closest to you. If you’re in Umm al-Fahm, Tamra or Wadi Ara, and you search for a shelter, nothing will come up.”
Kabaha is the co-founder of Harmony, a networking group for Arab professionals established in January of last year. The group now boasts about 500 members. When the war broke out between Israel and Iran, they called a meeting that Friday. “We asked, ‘Why do we need to whine about this? It’s clear that there’s a crisis, it’s clear that [the authorities] have failed, it’s clear that there’s racism and discrimination – but instead of moping, let’s get up and do something.”
Not just maps
The result was an initiative called Safe Haven, which operates a website – HarmonySOS.com – that contains a register of some 1,200 shelters, mostly in Arab areas of Israel, organized and mapped out. “Within 48 hours, we got the website up and running,” Kabaha says, adding that he worked on it with fellow Harmony member Nadine Rouhana.
Through the Arabic-language site, volunteers can confirm on the ground that shelters are present and safe, and add the coordinates to the map. Those with private shelters in their apartment building or home can also register to invite others in the vicinity to use their space. While Google shows no shelters in Nazareth, the HarmonySOS site shows over a dozen.
Mahdi Kabaha, the co-founder of the Harmony networking group and director of the Safe Haven initiative
To spread the word, they kicked off a campaign on Instagram. Within 72 hours of launching it, he says, they reached 350,000 people. As of Tuesday, their campaign has 1.1 million views. The Arab population in Israel, he notes, “is a community of 2 million people. That’s incredible.”
The project is more than a website, he explains, and operates on several levels. Their first task was to ensure that municipalities open the shelters they have. Many residents of Arab towns look to schools as an alternative to public shelters, since each is supposed to have a fortified space. But, Kabaha explains, many were already in use as storage facilities, computer rooms or classrooms.
“From assessments we did out in the field,” the day after Israel declared war, “we saw that these schools were closed to the public. Municipal officials, sadly, don’t want to open them out of concern that people would damage the equipment inside.” He and other members of the initiative have been working to pressure mayors and officials to ensure that these shelters are open and accessible to all. “In some locations, the problem persists, and they still haven’t opened the shelters, but we’re still pushing them on it.”
Many municipalities in Arab cities and towns cooperated with the initiative, says Kabaha, but the initiative made others nervous. From the website, residents of a town that doesn’t have suitable shelters can see that nearby Arab towns do, and turn that frustration into pressure on their leadership.
Those municipalities “felt threatened by us, because now the citizens in their territory can see that this or that town has been negligent about shelters and start applying pressure. It’s a very, very reproachful tool,” he says. “Some of them see us as having harmed their reputations, but they’re a small minority. Some have cooperated, and some have refused to open their shelters until we applied even more pressure.”
Despite this, he says, he does not blame municipalities for these lapses. “In the end, the state is responsible for our safety, and not the mayors. If a mayor doesn’t want to open up the shelters, it’s not the citizens who should be knocking on their doors, it’s the state who should be making them do it, end of story,” he says.
Kabaha notes that the website also addresses the community’s information shortage. “On the HarmonySOS website, we also opened a form where anyone who was affected [by the barrages] and needs to consult with a professional – a lawyer, an accountant, even a doctor – and they’ll get back to them, all for free.” He notes that few in the Arab community file requests to the government for replacement or reimbursement of property damaged by war. “They generally just fix it and go on with their lives,” he says. “The Arab community doesn’t know how to file these requests or exercise these rights.”
Harmony also established a volunteer-operated operations center providing emotional support and legal aid through its Safe Shelter initiative. They have also opened WhatsApp groups to better inform Arabic-speaking citizens about what to do after receiving an alert.
‘Constant danger’
Lital Piller, a research assistant in the Israel Democracy Institute’s Arab Society in Israel Program, authored a widely cited report published last week about the lack of shelters in Arab towns and cities. “Arab localities in Israel are in a state of inadequate protection and suffer from gaps in protective infrastructure compared to Jewish localities (some of which also lack adequate protection),” she wrote. “The absence of such protective infrastructure condemns the residents of these communities to live in constant danger and undermines their fundamental rights to life, bodily integrity and equality.”
She tells Haaretz that this is the result of policies spanning decades. “The roots go back to the 1950s and ’60s, when many Arab local authorities were established – sometimes without regulated planning, and usually with minimal budgets allocated by the state,” Piller says.
She adds that they became starker after the 1991 Gulf War, when Israel passed regulations to ensure that each new building would be constructed with a protected space. “The regulations were not adapted to, and did not address, neighborhoods and Arab localities that were built without permits.” During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, in which 18 Arab citizens were killed, the chasm widened, but the government did not act.
Many factors, she says, contribute to this disparity. Arab localities receive sparser state resources and smaller budgets compared to most Jewish towns, including for emergency preparedness. Zoning and building plans are rarely granted approval by the state, and some localities have no active planning committees, which results in unregulated construction that does not incorporate costly shelters into new buildings.
There was also a belief among the defense establishment until 2006 that Arab cities and towns simply would not be affected by missile attacks. And in the case of Bedouin citizens in the Negev, she notes, since unrecognized villages are not a part of any municipality or local authority, it is even more difficult to provide them with solutions.
“Taken together, these factors have created a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens live without basic protection and are exposed to life-threatening danger in their homes, in public spaces, and in educational institutions,” she adds.
Responsibility for this lies with both local authorities – the municipalities – and the government, “but in practice,” she notes, “the main burden falls on the state.” The IDF’s Home Front Command sets the standards for planning and constructing shelters, and “funding and planning for these measures must come from the state, particularly in areas where local governments lack resources or depend heavily on national support.”
Home and business owners are responsible for building and maintaining private shelters, she notes, while municipalities are tasked with the construction and upkeep of public ones – “but their capacity may be limited by budget constraints, such as in many Arab localities,” she says.
“The Home Front Command is also responsible for overseeing that local authorities fulfill their duties to maintain both public and private shelters. According to the law, if a local authority fails to enforce shelter requirements for homeowners or business owners, the designated authority – usually the Home Front Command or someone authorized by them – can order the local authority to act. If the local authority still does not comply, the state can step in, carry out the work itself, and require the local authority to cover the costs.”
‘This is the state’s work to do’
So far, Kabaha says that they have received good feedback from the website. “One person told us that she was on the way to Acre, and there was a siren on the way, so she went to the website and found a shelter in Tamra that was open, which helped calm her down. Now she says that she feels more safe and confident commuting to and from work, because she can now find the closest shelter, especially with the [phone] notification that comes 10 minutes before the missiles.” He adds that they have an app on the way as well.
At the same time, he says, all of their efforts are volunteer-based, and the project is eating into their time and finances. “We’re indebted to Google,” he notes, as it costs over 10,000 NIS to use the Google Maps software. “We started fundraising, and three people donated – and all three are volunteers with us.”
For Kabaha, this project is his main task at the moment. He sees its importance, but he also believes that it should not be his or Harmony’s obligation at all. “We’re filling the gap that the state is supposed to fill,” he says. “This is the state’s work to do. Everything we’ve done from last Thursday up to now, the state should have done a day earlier. We needed all of these things on Wednesday,” the day before Israel struck Iran. “This wasn’t a surprise that they were striking Iran and they were going to retaliate against Israel.”
He adds that it indicates a far deeper problem. “The failure here is compounded – it’s massive. It’s not just that they didn’t check the shelters and have everything ready; if they knew we’re going to war with Iran, and they didn’t prepare the Arab community for it in advance, that’s much worse.”
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