A dozen cats wake up in cages stacked on top of one another, leaving a pungent odor in the air as two veterinarians work diligently in a room next door.
Captured in the streets of Jerusalem by city workers or brought in by residents, at least 15 cats a day are sterilized at the municipal veterinary center.
However, experts have said that the number is far too few to stabilize the burgeoning street cat population.
The concentration of stray cats in the Holy City is among the highest in the Middle East, or even the world, experts have said.
With nearly 2,000 cats per square kilometer, it has a total of about 240,000, in a city of more than 900,000 residents, Jerusalem Veterinary Services head Asaf Bril said.
Only a large-scale, rapid program to sterilize about 80 percent of the cats within a six month period would be capable of bringing the population under control, he said.
“To achieve that result, 25 clinics like mine would be needed to sterilize 500 cats per day,” he said.
Reducing the cats’ access to their main source of food is another option for bringing the stray population under control. The hordes of cats find most of their food in rubbish bins that sometimes overflow, especially in mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem.
Israel considers the entire city its capital, although public services in parts of east Jerusalem are noticeably poorer than in the mainly Jewish western sector.
The city council has launched a plan to modernize rubbish collection, moving some bins underground and therefore depriving the cats of the food source.
“Ultimately, underground rubbish bins that reduce the availability of food for cats are the only solution to control the size of the population,” said Amir Balaban, of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.
However, newly elected Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion in January announced the creation of feeding stations around the city.
The decision aims to provide a transition that is clean and more controlled between free-for-all access to the bins and their eventual removal.
For Inbal Keidar, a lawyer specializing in animal welfare issues, it is merely a cosmetic measure and fails to adequately address the problem.
“What is needed is a real political decision to solve the problem with a massive sterilization campaign for cats, while mobilizing associations and public authorities,” she said.
However, Israeli Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel in 2015 refused to use US$4.5 million in government funding made available for the sterilization of stray cats, Keidar said.
As an Orthodox Jew, the minister had said that castrating cats was contrary to Jewish religious law and had proposed sending stray cats and dogs to other countries instead.
Associations and volunteers have sought to fill the void for what they complain is a lack of political will and public funding.
Teacher Ilana Ben Joya feeds dozens of cats twice a day in a working-class area of Jerusalem.
“It’s my second job,” said the mother of two, aged in her 50s. “I can’t handle knowing that there are so many outside hungry. What worries me is knowing that in a few weeks the females will have babies, and we will again hear the meows of kittens.”
She, too, believes that there should be a large-scale sterilization program.
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