Case Number

HCJ 8397/06

Date Decided

5-29-2007

Decision Type

Original

Document Type

Full Opinion

Abstract

Facts: For many years ‘Qassam’ rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip at the town of Sederot and settlements in Israel near the Gaza Strip. The government decided to equip the schools in the area with protection against the rockets. The method of protection decided upon by the respondents for the classrooms of students in grades 4-12 was the method of ‘protected areas.’ According to this, whenever the alarm is sounded that rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip, the students are required to leave their classrooms and go to a protected area. The petitioners challenged this decision, on the ground that it did not provide adequate protection for the students in those classrooms.

Held: The respondents’ decision was extremely unreasonable and should, therefore, be set aside. According to the respondents’ experiments, only in 70-75% of cases did the students reach the ‘protected area’ within fifteen seconds - the critical period of time for doing so. Moreover, in some cases when rockets were fired no alarm was sounded. Although the cost of providing full protection for all the classrooms is considerable, and even though the court does not lightly intervene in matters of budgetary considerations, in view of the extent of the threat, the likelihood it will be realized, and the number of students exposed, the decision not to equip the classrooms with full protection is so unreasonable as to justify judicial intervention.

Keywords

Constitutional Law -- State of Emergency and National Security

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