A petition filed to the High Court of Justice, just two days before the war with Iran began, has taken on new urgency after repeated missile barrages, deaths linked to failed access to shelter, and a Knesset discussion on Monday that, according to advocates, ended without a concrete operational answer.
The petition, filed on February 26 by the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, asks the court to order the state to immediately establish an accessible evacuation mechanism for people with disabilities and elderly residents who cannot physically reach a protected space in time during alerts.
The filing seeks an urgent mandatory order requiring authorities to transport such residents to guesthouses or other adapted sites with accessible protected spaces, and to clarify which state body is actually responsible for carrying that out.
That demand has only grown sharper since Iran opened direct fire on Israel on Saturday. Since the start of the war, emergency responders and news outlets have repeatedly documented injuries sustained while civilians ran for cover, including the death of a 102-year-old man who fell on his way to a protected space in Ramat Gan and later died of his wounds.
Additionally, Israeli media identified a woman killed in the first-day Tel Aviv strike as a foreign caregiver for an elderly woman in an older building without an in-building protected space.
The wider shelter problem has been visible throughout the fighting. Emergency services have repeatedly reported people injured on the way to protected spaces during Iranian barrages, including after multiple alerts in a single night.
On Monday, as another day of salvos hit central Israel, one person was killed, and two were seriously wounded in what officials described as an Iranian cluster-warhead attack, while the Home Front Command stressed that the casualties in that incident were outside shelters.
Against that backdrop, the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee convened two discussions on Monday: one at 10 a.m. on proposed emergency-accessibility regulations, including provisions on locating protected spaces and access to information, and another at 12:30 p.m. specifically on accessible protection for people with disabilities and the elderly in emergencies.
The committee agenda listed representatives from the Defense Ministry and the IDF, the Home Front Command, the Interior Ministry, the Welfare Ministry, the Health Ministry, the National Insurance Institute, local government bodies, and disability-rights organizations among those invited.
According to the petition itself, the legal basis for the request is not a new policy invention but existing law: the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Law and the 2022 regulations on accessible evacuation and absorption during emergencies.
The filing points to provisions requiring advance preparation for evacuating people with disabilities, including adapted vehicles, equipment, accessible reception facilities, and the identification of a “dispatching authority” responsible for evacuation in practice.
No operational mechanism for wheelchair users, homebound, reliant individuals
The petition argues that despite those frameworks, no functioning operational mechanism exists for hundreds of thousands of people who are wheelchair users, homebound, dependent on medical equipment, or reliant on caregivers.
It cites a current example of an 85-year-old woman in central Israel who is wheelchair-bound, has early dementia, lives on a third floor without an elevator, and has neither a shelter nor a safe room - a case the JIJ petitions stresses illustrates why repeated descents during nighttime sirens become impossible, especially as warning times shorten.
The filing also says earlier appeals to government officials and committee discussions last year did not produce an adequate solution.
The Jerusalem Institute of Justice framed the issue in stark terms, calling the danger “known and preventable” and arguing that the deaths of the caregiver and the 102-year-old man were not isolated tragedies but evidence that a longstanding systemic failure remained unresolved.
It said about 20% of Israel’s population - some 1.8 million people - are people with disabilities, and that many cannot physically reach protected spaces within the available warning time.
After the committee session, the organization said the hearing yielded no operative solution, and that no answers were given regarding the evacuation of people with disabilities to places with protected spaces, that local-government representatives did not answer questions about municipal responsibility, and that welfare and other ministries shifted responsibility from one body to another, with no one taking ownership of a decision that would change conditions for disabled Israelis during the war.
That allegation of institutional buck-passing echoes the filing itself.
The petition names the ministers of the Welfare and Social Affairs and Health portfolios, as well as acting National Insurance director-general Zvi Cohen, and Local Government Center chairman Haim Bibas as respondents, and argues that the state already holds relevant data through welfare authorities, local social-welfare departments, and National Insurance databases, but has failed to turn that information into an emergency evacuation system.
The petition also lands amid broader scrutiny of Israel’s shelter gaps. In a January report, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman said physical protection is a basic condition for saving lives under missile and drone fire, and noted that protection gaps affect not only exposure levels but also the need for population evacuation and the emergency preparedness required of local authorities.
The report, prepared before the current war, said its findings were only underscored by the Iranian missile campaign that followed.
For petitioners, that is now the point: what was treated as an administrative gap before the war has become, under repeated Iranian fire, an immediate life-and-death question.
The legal framework exists, the vulnerable population is known, and the sirens are no longer hypothetical. What remains unanswered is whether the state will, under court pressure or otherwise, create a mechanism to move people who cannot get to shelter on their own before the next alert sounds.