Al-Murabitin Street, Sur Baher, Jerusalem

Jerusalem's local planning and building committee approved permit 101-1274018 for seven housing units on Al-Murabitin Street, in the Sur Baher quarter of southeastern Jerusalem, six of them added to the single unit the earlier permit allowed. The file covers an existing building and licenses construction that had gone beyond the terms of the earlier permit, so the municipal record now matches what stands on the plot. The national planning system places the plot centroid at 31.7306 N, 35.2375 E.

The address sits at the southern end of the Sur Baher and Umm Tuba quarter, and OpenStreetMap resolves the coordinate to Al-Murabitin road inside Umm Tuba. Sur Baher lies east of Ramat Rachel and northeast of Har Homa, about 5 km south of the Old City, and counted some 15,000 residents in 2006. Israel assigns 6,476 dunams of the combined Sur Baher and Umm Tuba land area, 78.5 percent of it, to the Jerusalem Municipality.

A retroactive permit changes the legal standing of the property. Once the committee issues it, the built area is licensed under the Planning and Building Law, the deviation file closes, and the unit can be registered and mortgaged on the same footing as any permitted home in Jerusalem. The permit covers seven units, so the property is a small apartment building.

Day-to-day services sit inside the quarter. Two schools opened in Sur Baher in May 2007 on land cleared of mines, a girls' school for 800 students and the Ibn Rushd boys' school for 700. Maccabi runs a clinic at 27 Al-Omari Street and Clalit operates a Sur Baher branch. Derech Sur Baher carries local traffic north toward Hebron Road, the Talpiot commercial district and the Armon HaNatziv promenade.