The Israeli separation barrier does not follow a neat political line. In Jerusalem, it cuts through neighborhoods, bisects communities, and in at least two significant cases — Kufr Aqab and the Shuafat refugee camp — it places entire Palestinian residential areas inside the city’s municipal boundaries but on the wrong side of the wall. The result is a geography that defies ordinary logic: residents who hold Jerusalem residency cards, who pay Jerusalem municipal taxes, who are legally part of the city — yet who must pass through a military checkpoint every time they want to enter the city they officially live in.
For families, this is not an abstraction. It is a daily calculation of time, risk, and loss.
A Wall That Did Not Follow the Municipal Border
When Israel began constructing the barrier in 2002, officially framed as a security measure, its route in and around Jerusalem diverged sharply from the 1949 Armistice Line — the Green Line — and from Jerusalem’s own municipal boundary. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) documented the consequences extensively in its reporting on the Jerusalem envelope: roughly 55,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency were effectively enclosed on the West Bank side of the barrier, cut off from the city their ID cards said they belonged to.
Kufr Aqab, a neighborhood in the far north of Jerusalem’s municipal area, and the Shuafat refugee camp sit in this paradox. Legally, both fall within the Jerusalem municipality. Practically, neither receives adequate municipal services — OCHA and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers the Shuafat camp, have both reported chronic deficits in waste collection, road maintenance, and infrastructure investment. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has described the situation plainly: Israel collects taxes from these residents and withholds the services taxes are meant to fund.
The International Court of Justice, in its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall, found that the barrier’s route — particularly where it deviated from the Green Line to encircle Israeli settlements — violated international humanitarian law. The Court called on Israel to cease construction in those sections and to make reparations for damages caused. Israel did not comply.
Kufr Aqab: Inside the City, Beyond the Wall
Kufr Aqab is home to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 residents — figures that have grown partly because Palestinians who want to preserve their Jerusalem residency status but cannot afford rents inside the barrier have moved here, where housing is cheaper. To retain that status, Jerusalem ID holders must demonstrate that Jerusalem is their “center of life” — a bureaucratic standard enforced by the Israeli Interior Ministry that has resulted in tens of thousands of ID revocations since 1967, according to data compiled by HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual.
The cruel irony is structural. A family living in Kufr Aqab is living in Jerusalem by Israeli law, yet to reach any Jerusalem institution — a hospital, a courthouse, a government office, a school on the other side of the barrier — they must pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint, one of the largest and most congested military crossings in the West Bank. During morning rush hours, the wait can stretch beyond an hour. During periods of heightened military activity, the checkpoint closes entirely.
For children, the calculus is stark. Families whose children attend schools inside the barrier — schools they are entitled to attend as Jerusalem residents — must factor checkpoint wait times into every school morning. A child who misses too many days loses her place. A parent who cannot afford the time loses wages. Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement and OCHA have both documented how checkpoint delays systematically disrupt Palestinian access to education and employment, framing closure not as an exceptional event but as a structural condition.
Shuafat Camp: UNRWA Services, Municipal Neglect
The Shuafat refugee camp presents a variation on the same wound. Established after 1948 to house Palestinians displaced from villages including Lifta and Sharafat, it is the only official UNRWA-administered refugee camp located within an Israeli municipality’s boundaries. Its roughly 25,000 registered refugees — with estimates of the actual population running considerably higher — hold a mix of Jerusalem residency and refugee registration status.
UNRWA has provided schooling inside the camp for decades. But camp residents who need to reach Jerusalem — for work, for specialized medical care, for family — cross through the Shuafat checkpoint. In its reports, OCHA has described the checkpoint as a site of daily humiliation and delay. In October 2022, following a gun attack near the checkpoint, Israeli forces sealed Shuafat camp for several days, confining tens of thousands of people. Ambulances were delayed. A Palestinian man, Tariq Jabara, died after an ambulance was reportedly held at the checkpoint, according to reporting by Haaretz and documentation by Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organization.
Spouses separated by the wall face a specific legal jeopardy. A Jerusalem ID holder who moves to the West Bank side — even the Kufr Aqab side, technically still Jerusalem — risks having the Interior Ministry determine that their “center of life” has shifted, triggering revocation. The partner holding a West Bank ID cannot enter Jerusalem freely. The result, documented by HaMoked across hundreds of cases, is that couples manage their marriages around checkpoints, that fathers meet children at crossing points, that elderly parents are visited only when the checkpoint allows.
What Legal Scholars and Rights Groups Have Said
Noura Erakat, the Palestinian-American legal scholar and author of Justice for Some, has argued that Israel’s management of Jerusalem residency — through the “center of life” policy, the ID revocation system, and the barrier’s route — constitutes a form of demographic engineering, using administrative and physical mechanisms to reduce the Palestinian population within the areas Israel seeks to control. Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, has challenged multiple aspects of the residency revocation regime in Israeli courts with limited success.
The barrier in Jerusalem is now largely complete and, in most sections, permanent. The concrete is up to eight meters high. The families on either side of it are not abstractions in a policy dispute. They are people who built their lives in a city that then walled itself against them — and who cross, every morning, through a checkpoint in the middle of what used to be their neighborhood.
Sources
- OCHA oPt, The Humanitarian Impact of the Barrier (multiple editions), ochaopt.org
- UN General Assembly, Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, A/ES-10/273, 2004
- B’Tselem, The Separation Barrier, btselem.org
- HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem, hamoked.org
- UNRWA, Shuafat Refugee Camp Profile, unrwa.org
- Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, reports on checkpoint access, gisha.org
- Al-Haq, documentation on Shuafat camp closure, October 2022, alhaq.org
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- Adalah, Discriminatory Laws Database — Residency and Entry, adalah.org
