The Safed Municipality has issued a contract to provide the city’s only Arab neighborhood with sewage infrastructure following appeals to the Nazareth District Court and the Supreme Court by NIF grantee Adalah: Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. The company contracted for the work sent a letter to Adalah pledging to complete the project by mid-July. 

The sewage infrastructure will end an ecological nightmare for the residents of the Akbara neighborhood, which stretches back to the establishment of the State. Back in 1948, several dozen Arab residents of surrounding Galilee villages moved to temporary accommodation near Safed. For more than thirty years, no public services were provided to the neighborhood. It was only in 1982 that they were finally incorporated into Safed and their legal right to the land they live on was recognized.

However, the Safed Municipality has consistently refused to build sewage infrastructure for Akbara on the grounds that they have no budget available. The residents of Akbara were compelled to dig cesspits, which are an environmental and health hazard, contaminating the groundwater and creating mosquito infested swamps with foul odors that have caused disease and skin allergies.

Because of Adalah’s pressure, the Safed Municipality agreed to build the sewage infrastructure before the courts ruled on the matter.