A Street That Once Belonged to Everyone
In the years before 1994, Shuhada Street was the commercial spine of Hebron — a crowded, living artery where Palestinian merchants sold produce, fabric, and household goods, and where families moved freely through the heart of their city. Today, that same street is largely silent. Its shopfronts are welded shut. Its pavements, in large stretches, are forbidden to the Palestinian residents whose families have lived alongside it for generations. The Shuhada Street Hebron closure did not happen overnight. It accumulated, restriction by restriction, in the years following one of the most traumatic events in the city’s modern history.
The Massacre That Became a Pretext for Restriction
On 25 February 1994, an American-Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque — the Cave of the Patriarchs — during Ramadan morning prayers and opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29 people and wounding more than 125, according to B’Tselem’s documentation of the event. Rather than responding to the massacre by removing or constraining the settler population whose presence had necessitated a large military deployment, Israeli authorities imposed a curfew on the city’s Palestinian residents. In the period that followed, Shuhada Street was closed to Palestinian vehicles. Then, in stages through the late 1990s and accelerating after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Palestinian pedestrian access was almost entirely revoked — restricted to residents of the immediate area who could produce documentation proving they lived there.
B’Tselem, which has extensively documented the closure regime in Hebron’s H2 sector, describes a system in which approximately 34,000 Palestinians living in H2 are subject to movement restrictions that do not apply to the roughly 700 Israeli settlers living among them under military protection. The settlers move freely along Shuhada Street. Their Palestinian neighbours do not.
512 Shops Welded Shut: The Anatomy of Economic Erasure
The physical evidence of what has been lost is documented in granular detail. B’Tselem has recorded that approximately 512 Palestinian-owned shops along Shuhada Street and the surrounding H2 commercial zone have been forced to close — many of them literally welded shut by Israeli military order. Others were shuttered by their owners after repeated harassment, the impossibility of receiving stock, or the simple fact that customers could no longer reach them.
What this means in practice is a neighbourhood that has been economically hollowed out. The families who owned these businesses did not leave voluntarily. They were made unable to operate. Whole streets of two- and three-storey market buildings now stand with their metal shutters painted over or corroded with rust, their interiors untouched since the early 2000s. The Palestinian commercial life that once animated this district — which sat at the crossroads of trade routes linking Hebron to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the southern West Bank — has been extinguished not by market forces but by military order.
Living Under the Closure: What Residents and Soldiers Have Described
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Palestine, which has maintained a continuous presence in Hebron since 1995, has produced field reports documenting the daily texture of life under this closure regime. CPT volunteers have recorded incidents of Palestinians being turned back at checkpoints by soldiers, of residents required to use back routes and rooftop passages to reach their own homes, and of children navigating military checkpoints simply to get to school. The presence of CPT in Tel Rumeida and the surrounding H2 area has provided one of the few sustained records of how these restrictions operate at street level, day after day, in ways that rarely register in formal reports.
Breaking the Silence, the organisation of Israeli military veterans who have served in Hebron and collected testimonies about their experiences, has published accounts describing the logic soldiers were given for enforcing these closures — and the discomfort many veterans later expressed about what they had participated in. Their testimonies describe a military culture in which protecting a small settler population required the systematic subordination of the rights and movement of tens of thousands of Palestinians. One recurring theme in Breaking the Silence’s Hebron testimonies is the soldiers’ awareness that the restrictions they enforced bore no relationship to any specific security incident — they were structural, permanent, and applied collectively.
A City Divided, a Street That Remembers What It Was
Shuhada Street — whose name means “martyrs” in Arabic — now stands as one of the most documented examples of how military closure and settler expansion can combine to transform a living city into something approaching a controlled zone. The Palestinian families who remain in H2 do so under conditions that B’Tselem has characterised as a form of forced displacement by attrition: making life difficult enough, and access to normal economic and social activity constrained enough, that departure comes to feel like the only option.
The shops remain sealed. The street remains divided. And the people whose city this was continue to navigate its ruins.
Sources
- B’Tselem — Hebron: Wholesale Closure of the City Centre to Palestinians
- Breaking the Silence — Soldier Testimonies from Hebron
- Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) Palestine — Hebron Field Reports
