Bureaucratic failures hamstrung social services in wake of Oct. 7, report finds
Comptroller says Health Ministry failed to arrange transfer of funds to ‘resilience centers’ for trauma treatment; Treasury failings meant NIS 16 million unavailable for treatments
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
The Health Ministry failed to properly implement and utilize government-approved budgets designated for social services centers to help citizens cope with trauma and other mental health and well-being concerns in the wake of the October 7 Hamas invasion, the State Comptroller reported on Tuesday.
As a result of the failings, only a very small number of people received social services from these centers, while large numbers of people in some district centers faced lengthy waiting times for the various treatments meant to be on offer.
According to the report, the Health Ministry failed to set up the necessary arrangements for the utilization of government funds by “resilience centers” months after they were approved, while Finance Ministry failings meant millions of shekels allocated for social services and trauma treatments remain unavailable to those centers.
These failures created funding uncertainties for these centers, which in turn led to operational problems that the comptroller said may damage the service they provide.
The report was conducted between January and April 2024 as part of the State Comptroller’s comprehensive review of failings before, during and after the October 7 attack, and reviewed the 14 resilience centers operated by the Health Ministry, which are supposed to provide services for some 1.3 million people.
In the report, the comptroller noted that 210,000 people were evacuated or evacuated themselves from their homes as a result of the war; thousands of people were wounded in the October 7 attack, alongside the nearly 1,200 people who were killed and 251 taken captive; thousands of people hid during the course of Hamas’s invasion in fear for their lives; many witnessed directly or indirectly the atrocities committed by Hamas and other terror groups that day to their relatives, friends, and neighbors; and huge damage was done to homes, towns, factories and other property.
“The events of October 7 and the events that followed severely damaged the sense of personal and communal resilience of the population in Israel,” the report asserted.
Yet, the comptroller found that the resilience centers established to help citizens with these exact concerns were not effectively utilized to meet the challenges to the well-being of those affected by the cataclysmic events of October 7.
The study pointed out that a study it conducted found that fully 38 percent of the Israeli population was suffering from some form of post-trauma after the events of October 7, and asserted that the resilience centers had come nowhere near to providing an adequate service for such people.
Despite the large number of people affected by the onslaught and its fallout, resilience centers only treated 15,750 people from October 7 until the end of that year, out of the 1.3 million people they were supposed to serve, the report found.
Bureaucratic failings in which funds appropriated for the centers were not transferred in a timely and orderly fashion compounded the problems.
According to the State Comptroller’s review, the government allocated an extra NIS 35 million ($9.75 million) for resilience centers above the basic budget for the last three months of 2023 in the wake of the October 7 attack.
But by the end of April 2024, the Health Ministry had still not transferred 33% of those funds, some NIS 9.6 million ($2.7 million), to one of the resilience center operators.
And though some NIS 150 ($42 million) million was allocated for resilience centers for 2024 by the government, by the end of April, the Health Ministry had not formulated the necessary agreements with the operators of the centers for expanding their funding. Down payments were sent to the operators to ensure the centers would continue to operate, but even then, it took two months for those advances to be paid.
Additionally, the report found that the Finance Ministry had failed to create a funding framework for resilience centers anchored in the Health Ministry’s budget despite recommendations to do so three years ago.
As a result, a January 2024 government decision to allocate an extra NIS 30 million ($8.4 million) for the resilience centers was not fully implemented, with only NIS 14 million ($4 million) anchored into the Health Ministry’s budget. The remaining NIS 16 million ($4.5 million) is still formally allocated within the budgets of other ministries and cannot currently be utilized by the resilience centers.
The report noted that although the resilience centers are meant to be able to provide immediate assistance to those requiring it in times of emergency, some centers had long waiting times.
In the Ashkelon center, 450 people were waiting for a primary evaluation appointment to determine what treatment they needed in February 2024.
“Given the large size of the evacuee population scattered throughout the country since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron War on the southern and northern fronts and their broad need for treatment, the Health Ministry must prepare a systematic plan for their care through the resilience centers,” the report said.
“Furthermore, the Health Ministry must also prepare action plans for the care of the evacuee population during security and safety [risk] incidents, such as natural disasters, which could happen in the future.”
The Health Ministry said in response that it has a “constant focus” on improving all aspects of the provision of services and treatment for trauma and other mental health requirements of the population “as part of a broad national plan that the ministry is preparing.”
The ministry added that “the state of emergency that the State of Israel has found itself in since the outbreak of the Swords of Iron War was unexpected in every scenario that government ministries, including the Health Ministry and the resilience centers… had trained for.”
Despite this situation, “the resilience centers organized relatively quickly… and gradually built facilities that reduced the number of people waiting, increased the scope of group treatments and community facilities, and thus reduced waiting times.”
