In most cities, a street is just a street. In Hebron, a street can be the difference between movement and confinement, between a market open for business and one sealed behind iron barriers. Shuhada Street — once the commercial spine of one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth — has been closed to Palestinian pedestrians for decades, its shuttered storefronts a quiet, durable monument to what the 1997 Hebron Protocol made possible.
Hebron, known in Arabic as Al-Khalil, is home to roughly 215,000 Palestinians. It is the largest city in the West Bank and the economic engine of the southern part of the territory. It is also, since an agreement signed between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization on January 17, 1997, a city cut in two — not metaphorically, but administratively, physically, and in the texture of daily life.
The 1997 Protocol: What H1 and H2 Actually Mean
The Hebron Protocol divided the city into two administrative zones. H1 covers approximately 80 percent of the city’s area and falls under Palestinian Authority civil and security control. Roughly 170,000 Palestinians live there. H2 — the remaining 20 percent, encompassing the Old City, the Ibrahimi Mosque/Cave of Machpelah, and the historic city center — was placed under full Israeli military and civil control.
The justification offered at the time was the presence of a small number of Israeli settlers who had established themselves in the heart of the Old City following the 1967 occupation. By 1997, that settler population numbered in the hundreds. Today, according to data compiled by B’Tselem, approximately 700 settlers live in four settlement clusters within H2: Tel Rumeida, Beit Hadassah, the Jewish Quarter, and the area around the Ibrahimi Mosque. Protecting those 700 settlers requires a permanent Israeli military presence and a system of movement restrictions that directly governs the daily lives of an estimated 35,000 Palestinians who also live in H2.
The asymmetry is stark. The settlers move freely. The Palestinians do not.
Shuhada Street: Closure as Policy
Before the Oslo process, Shuhada Street was a busy commercial artery. Palestinian families ran shops selling produce, textiles, and household goods. Buses moved through it. The street connected the Old City to the broader life of Hebron.
The closures came in stages. After the Cave of Machpelah massacre in February 1994 — when American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinian worshippers during Ramadan prayers — Israeli authorities imposed curfews and restrictions on Palestinian movement rather than on the settler community whose member had carried out the attack. Those restrictions hardened over time. Following violence during the Second Intifada, Shuhada Street was closed entirely to Palestinian pedestrian traffic.
B’Tselem has documented that as of recent years, more than 100 Palestinian-owned shops on and around Shuhada Street remain closed — welded shut by Israeli military order or abandoned after owners were denied access. The organization’s mapping work shows a ghost-town geography: streets where Palestinians who live on them cannot walk the full length of their own block, where a family might be required to exit through a back window or a rooftop because the front door opens onto a forbidden road.
The Israeli human rights organization HaMoked and the Palestinian group Al-Haq have both documented the checkpoint architecture that enforces this division: at peak counts, more than 100 checkpoints, roadblocks, and physical obstacles have been recorded within H2. Soldiers check identification. Permits are required. Some roads are forbidden to Palestinian vehicles. Others are forbidden to Palestinians on foot.
Tel Rumeida and the Settlement at the City’s Core
Of Hebron’s settlement clusters, Tel Rumeida sits on ground that carries particular historical and political weight. The site sits atop Tel Hebron, an archaeological mound with occupation layers stretching back millennia. Settlers began moving there in the 1980s, and the outpost — later retroactively authorized by Israeli authorities — has been documented by Peace Now and Bimkom as one of the more legally contested settlement sites in the West Bank, given the complexity of its relationship to the archaeological record and to Palestinian property claims.
Residents of Tel Rumeida live under what amounts to a separate legal and physical regime from their Palestinian neighbors a few meters away. Under Israeli law as applied in the West Bank, settlers are governed by Israeli civil law; Palestinians in the same territory are governed by military law. Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and Yesh Din have both published analyses describing this as a form of legal dualism operating on the same ground, a structure that legal scholars and the UN have characterized as discriminatory in its application.
The settler population in Hebron is not demographically significant by the numbers — 700 people in a city of over 200,000. But as the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem argued in its 2019 report on Hebron, the settlements’ political function exceeds their size. They serve as the anchor for a military presence that constrains the movement, economy, and planning rights of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and they occupy the symbolic and commercial heart of the city.
TIPH: International Observers and Their Expulsion
One of the less-discussed provisions of the Hebron Protocol was the establishment of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, known as TIPH. Composed of civilian observers from Norway, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, and Turkey, TIPH was tasked with monitoring the situation in H2 and reporting on violations. It was not a protection force — its observers were unarmed — but its presence represented an internationally sanctioned witness function in one of the most surveilled and contested urban spaces in the occupied territories.
TIPH operated in Hebron for more than two decades. In January 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would not renew TIPH’s mandate, effectively expelling the mission. The decision came shortly after TIPH submitted what Israeli officials described as a biased report — though the report itself was not made public. The governments of Norway, Sweden, and the other participating states criticized the decision. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called it a further erosion of international oversight in H2.
With TIPH gone, the primary documentation of conditions in H2 has fallen to Palestinian civil society, Israeli human rights organizations, and groups like Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which has maintained a presence in Hebron since 1995. CPT’s field reports have documented settler violence against Palestinian residents, military detention of Palestinian children, and the progressive contraction of Palestinian movement in the Old City. Their work, cross-referenced with B’Tselem’s field research and OCHA’s periodic reporting on the West Bank, forms much of the available public record of life in H2.
What the Division Has Cost
OCHA oPt has reported that the Palestinian population of H2 has declined significantly since the late 1990s, as families have left — driven by movement restrictions, settler harassment documented by multiple human rights organizations, and the economic collapse of the Old City’s commercial sector. Properties stand empty. Schools have lost students. The market that once made Hebron’s Old City one of the most visited in the West Bank generates a fraction of its former activity.
The Ibrahimi Mosque itself — one of the holiest sites in Islam, built over a structure revered in Judaism as the Cave of Machpelah — was physically partitioned after the 1994 massacre. For designated Jewish holidays, Palestinian Muslims are barred from the entire site. The partition of prayer space in one of the world’s most ancient religious buildings is, in miniature, the logic of the entire H1/H2 arrangement: presence managed, movement controlled, access calibrated not by the equal rights of those who live there but by the security needs assigned to those who arrived most recently.
For the 35,000 Palestinians of H2, that calibration is not a political abstraction. It is the checkpoint at the end of the block. It is the welded door on Shuhada Street. It is the question, every morning, of which route is open today.
Sources
- B’Tselem — Hebron: The City of the Patriarchs (reports and field documentation)
- OCHA oPt — Periodic reporting on H2 and West Bank movement restrictions
- The Hebron Protocol (January 17, 1997) — Agreement on the Redeployment in Hebron, signed by the PLO and the Government of Israel
- Yesh Din — Legal dualism in the West Bank: settlers and military law
- Al-Haq — Documentation of movement restrictions and closures in H2
- HaMoked — Checkpoint and permit documentation in H2
- Peace Now — Settlement data for Hebron/H2
- Bimkom — Planning rights and archaeological site disputes, Tel Rumeida
- Christian Peacemaker Teams Hebron — Field reports on H2 conditions
- UN Security Council records relating to TIPH and Hebron (1997–2019)
