Ministry strike leaves East Jerusalemites in limbo
An open-ended staff strike at the Interior Ministry in Jerusalem has left Palestinian residents unable to access critical documents.
Yasmine was born in July 2014 at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center. Six months later, she has yet to get a birth certificate from the Israeli authorities. While her mother Tamara was born and has lived all her life in East Jerusalem, young Yasmine’s sin is that her father hails from the nearby West Bank city of Beit Jala.
Shortly after Yasmine's birth, Tamara took her daughter and all the necessary documents — the rental agreement for her Jerusalem home, utility bills and her blue ID card proving that Jerusalem is her place of residence — to the small office of the Israeli Ministry of Interior in East Jerusalem’s Wadi al-Joz neighborhood and waited in a long line.
