When Iranian missiles began raining down on Israel, many residents scrambled for cover and sirens wailed across the country as people rushed into bomb shelters, Al Jazeera reports.

But for some Palestinian citizens of Israel — two million people, or roughly 21 per cent of the population — doors were slammed shut, not by the force of the blasts and not by enemies, but by neighbours and fellow citizens.

For Samar al-Rashed, a 29-year-old single mother living in a mostly Jewish apartment complex near Acre, the reality of that exclusion came on Friday night. Samar was at home with her five-year-old daughter, Jihan. As sirens rang, she took her daughter and rushed for the building’s shelter.

“I didn’t have time to pack anything,” she told Al Jazeera. “Just water, our phones, and my daughter’s hand in mine.”

But at the shelter door, she said, an Israeli resident, having heard her speak Arabic, blocked their entry — and shut it in their faces. “I was stunned,” she said. “I speak Hebrew fluently. I tried to explain. But he looked at me with contempt and just said, ‘Not for you’.”

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