Ministries face cuts to fund evacuees from northern, southern border towns

The cabinet is expected to approve wide-ranging budget cuts today in order to redirect funds to aid for displaced residents of the north and south.

According to Hebrew media reports, all government ministries will have their budget slashed by 1.03 percent, prompting warnings from some ministers that vital services could be impacted.

This is not the first time that such a cut has been implemented and “this time it may seriously harm precisely those citizens for whose sake the cuts are being sought,” declares Health Minister Ariel Busso, whose ministry is set to lose NIS 32 million ($8.6 million).

“In the war it was proven that the Health Ministry is just as important as the Defense Ministry,” he says.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also complains about the pending cuts, arguing that they will negatively impact the procurement of equipment for police and civilian security squads as well as hobble efforts to expand prison capacity strained by the ongoing war in Gaza.

The government has repeatedly allocated funds to Ben Gvir’s ministry in an attempt to add additional space for prisoners — most recently in April when a NIS 225 million ($60 million) budget cut intended to pay for expanding the prison system went into effect across the government at his insistence.

The discussion of the budget cuts comes less than a week after the Knesset Finance Committee allocated hundreds of millions of shekels in “surplus” coalition funds to government ministries — including several deemed superfluous by the Finance Ministry.

Avidgor Liberman, the leader of the opposition Yisrael Beytenu party, complains that the government is set to cut “the health, welfare and education budgets for the benefit of the residents of the south and the north, but is jealously guarding the budgets of the unnecessary ministries for the sake of the integrity of the coalition.”

“The time has come for a different leadership,” he tweets.