An Israeli software developer has mapped more than 15,000 bomb shelters across Israel in a community-driven app called Miklat — Hebrew for "shelter" — making the reality of life under prolonged security threat visible in the form of a smartphone tool that hundreds of thousands of civilians may one day need in seconds.
The app, available on the Apple App Store, draws on data from GovMap, municipal authorities, and user-submitted additions to build an interactive map showing verified shelter locations across the country. When opened, it immediately surfaces the nearest shelter to the user's current location and provides turn-by-turn directions through Google Maps, Waze, or Apple Maps. Users can flag whether a shelter is open or closed, contributing real-time status information to the broader network.
The developer described the motivation plainly: after the events of recent years — a reference that requires no elaboration for Israelis who have lived through rocket barrages, cross-border missile exchanges, and the mass alert sirens of October 2023 — they wanted to build something that could concretely help people in a genuine emergency. The result is a tool shaped entirely by lived security anxiety.
In Israel, as across contested regions, security concerns and aspirations for normalcy exist in constant tension. The existence of Miklat illustrates that tension with unusual clarity. Israel's miklat network — the system of reinforced safe rooms and public shelters mandated by law in residential construction since 1992 — is a physical infrastructure of permanent emergency. Most Israelis know roughly where the nearest shelter is. Not everyone does. This app is built for the gap between rough knowledge and the thirty-second sprint when sirens sound.
Notably, the developer built the app in five languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, and Russian. The Arabic-language inclusion reflects the demographic reality of Israel's population, where Arab citizens constitute roughly 20 percent of the public and share the same infrastructure, the same sirens, and the same need for protection — a dimension of Israeli civic life that rarely surfaces in international coverage of the conflict.
The app is currently live on iOS. The Android rollout requires a minimum of 20 registered testers in Google's closed testing program before a public Play Store listing — a technical threshold the developer has asked for community help to clear, via a public testing link.
Miklat sits within a broader tradition of Israeli civilian technology emerging from security necessity — a country whose startup culture has long drawn a direct line between military-grade engineering and consumer application. What makes this case different is its register: it is not a defence contract or a venture-backed cybersecurity firm. It is one developer, mapping shelters, because they thought it might help.
