“Welcome to our house.” Sofía Salvador and María Tulitzeba go down in flip flops in the elevator of a shopping center in Haifa – the main city in northern Israel, attacked these days by both Iran and – from the surface area (which houses a supermarket, a pharmacy and some cafes) to the -5th floor, where they have been installed for days. There they live day and night, in a tent where they feel safer. They are not alone: the floor, almost the deepest in the parking lot, has been converted into a minibarrio underground with about thirty tents, children running around, dogs wandering and families eating at plastic tables. As in a camping outdoors, but in times of war and under the light of neon, lit 24 hours a day.
The parking lot began to fill up on Saturday, February 28, the day the United States and Israel . Ordinary people came to it who felt unprotected in the face of the first retaliatory bombings launched by Tehran and, from Lebanon, by Hezbollah against Israeli territory.
The shopping center is the same building with two parallel worlds. Below, the dozens of people who take refuge in the cold parking lot, where vehicles still arrive two floors above and where many others go, call them to seek shelter. Upstairs, three floors of supermarkets, hamburger restaurants and even a nail salon where the new inhabitants of the underground often walk. They walk through them in their lounge clothes, with the pace of someone who doesn’t have much else to do during the day.
Sofía Salvador is 27 years old and emigrated to Israel from Buenos Aires two years ago. Although the region was already on fire as a result of the war, he did not plan to experience a war with Iran and there have already been two in eight months. “We are here precisely because we do not have shelter. If not, we would be at home,” she explains, while drinking mate sitting at the entrance of her store.
According to January 2025 data from the State Controller (a kind of Israeli Ombudsman), approximately one third (about 3.2 million) of the country’s population, especially the Arab population, lacks adequate protection spaces, public or private. In Haifa, in particular, a good part of the buildings are old, with entire neighborhoods built more than half a century ago, before laws requiring the inclusion of private shelters in buildings. For this reason, its 280,000 inhabitants depend more on public shelters, which are not always close enough for projectiles, which take less time to reach than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
If they come from Lebanon, 40 kilometers to the north, the reaction time is just one minute. The strident advance warning on cell phones goes off almost at the same time as the air raid sirens, so Salvador and Tulitzeba prefer to move alone in the shopping center area. “In one minute you can’t think much. If we were in a park or a small square, I don’t know if we would get there… In the end, it would be better for you at the entrance to the shopping center,” argues the first.
Salvador admits the discomfort of sleeping every night in a tent, with the constant and impersonal light of neon filtering in and amid constant noises. Also not being able to cook (they receive or buy instant noodles, fruit or peanut butter) or do much more than play cards or look at the phone. “This is a camping. Literally,” he describes, with skateboard races and “end-to-end fights” in the parking lot when the noise prevents someone from sleeping.
But, he clarifies, it compensates them because they feel “calm,” unlike the first hours of the war, when they were still at home. They spent them restlessly, thinking about what to do between alert and alert. That same day they found out (through a conversation they caught on the street) that the parking lot existed, they took the suitcases they had left prepared some time ago and came determined to stay. The City Council has just installed a small refrigerator, a water dispenser and a collective charger for mobile phones.
The two feel even more vindicated in their decision since last Monday, when Hezbollah joined the fight, in retaliation against Israel for having killed the . The Lebanese militia has since launched several rockets and drones against the city, without causing any casualties.
The war against Iran extends further from the Middle East every day, involves more countries and will last “as long as it takes,” as US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday. The prospect of living for so long in a parking lot is almost taboo for both of us. “We know it could happen. I’m not going to lie, we talked about it last night and we stayed silent. We live day to day and try not to think too much,” Salvador admits.
For now, every day they go to a friend’s house, who does have the obligatory room with reinforced walls and a reinforced door. There they shower, wash clothes, visit their cat (“we brought him here to the parking lot at first, but it didn’t go well,” he admits) and take the opportunity to eat homemade food.
If the two young women are the new breed of the parking lot turned underground home, Yuri Shulga is a veteran. He works in an alcoholic beverage store inside the shopping center and in June 2025, he went down to take shelter, after an alert, and saw that there were people settled. “The shelter we have at home is not very good. It can be useful, but we felt that against those from Iran it was not safe at all,” he explains, while his children play around with those from other families.
That’s why, at dawn on Saturday, as soon as he learned that Israel and the United States had launched a massive bombing to try to overthrow the Iranian regime, he was very clear about what to do. “We understood that this would not be over in one or two days […] We have even brought a table, computers, microwave, kettle….”
He lives it with good humor. His children, he says, are delighted, without school (classes remain canceled sine the) and accelerating on a skateboard or bicycle through a flat space, difficult to find among the ups and downs of Haifa. “The hardest thing is the uncertainty. Not knowing what is going to happen. But here we feel safer,” he summarizes.
He also sees it as a toll that he had to pay at some point. “This war was inevitable,” he says. “Something that was going to happen in any case: tomorrow, the day after or in five years. The question is how it was going to happen, because we don’t know if Iran was a month or a year away from the nuclear bomb. So it better have happened now, without it having a nuclear weapon.”
Missile victim
Not all the residents of this pseudo-tent neighborhood are Israelis. Ellen Yani, 37, is one of those who came to the country to fill the lowest paid jobs and has been in conflict for more than two years. He lives in a humble neighborhood, where protection measures are scarce, as is often the case in those inhabited by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Haifa is one of the few mixed cities of Jews and Arabs.
Yani remembers that the missile defense system intercepts most projectiles, but “not all,” and emphasizes that she cares much more about feeling “safe” than comfortable. He immediately remembers that one of his compatriots, Mary Ann De Vera, was the only fatal victim of an Iranian missile. I was 32 years old and took care of an elderly woman.
“We have no shelter in our apartment and, when we went out to seek shelter in our neighbors’, we were afraid,” he says. The closest one was private, about 100 or 200 meters away, she estimates, while her two roommates, also Filipinos, set up the tents they just bought, aware that the situation is going on too long to continue sleeping together, crammed into a single one.
During the day, they take advantage of the feeling of tranquility that sunlight always gives to go to their apartment to shower and cook. And in the afternoon, before it gets dark, they return to the depths of the parking lot. It’s cold, but “sometimes the alerts are at midnight, so it’s much better to be safe here,” she justifies.
Vital uncertainty is also economic. Yani worked in a hotel and has stopped getting paid until no one knows when. Tulitzeba was employed at a bar that temporarily closed (it is not considered an essential service, as it does not serve food). Shulga’s store is still closed. And Sofía Salvador is unemployed and has not signed the contract she had planned for last week.
Their lives have stopped, but the rent will continue to arrive on time, like every month. “I’m worried, of course,” Yani says. “We don’t know when the war is going to end, what the near future is going to be like, where we are going to stay longer, how we are going to eat or what is going to happen to our jobs. We are not making money,” he lists. “Everything is difficult.”
