Ofakim gets NIS 229m after Oct. 7 massacre, but kept off national recovery plan
Funds prompt both gratitude and disappointment in a town ravaged by terrorists but excluded from compensation due to distance rules
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
The government announced plans to allocate NIS 229 million ($62 million) to people in the southern town of Ofakim to help them recover from the October 7 Hamas onslaught in the city, where terrorists murdered 47 people.
The funding follows a monthslong campaign by community leaders from Ofakim, which is the farthest destination reached by the infiltrating terrorists from Gaza, to also secure funding from the government. Ofakim was not included in the government’s broader rehabilitation plan for affected communities.
The one-time compensation package for residents of Ofakim and individuals who were in the city on October 7 will amount to NIS 7,180 ($1,962) per adult person and NIS 1,436 per child ($392), up to a ceiling of about NIS 20,000 ($5,500) per household, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced Wednesday.
The funding, the exact budget from which it will come has not yet been named, is meant to address what many from Ofakim and beyond perceive as the injustice of not including the city in the Tekuma Authority’s rehabilitation plan, which has a budget of NIS 19 billion (more than $5 billion).
The official reason for Ofakim’s exclusion is its distance from the Gaza border: 21 kilometers (13 miles). The Tekuma Authority, which is the government body leading the efforts to rehabilitate the area near the border with Gaza, is limited to locales within 7 kilometers of the border.
Advocates of including Ofakim in the plan argued that distance was a relevant threshold only for locales where it limited the level of devastation that Hamas terrorists were able to carry out.
Whereas they only fired rockets indiscriminately on Netivot and Ashkelon and other affected cities outside the Tekuma maximum radius, in Ofakim the terrorists went from house to house, perpetrating atrocities with the same lethality and precision as in the places that are under the Authority’s mandate, including Be’eri and Sderot.
More than a dozen terrorists reached Ofakim in several pickup trucks, overwhelming security forces and massacring civilians. For two days after October 7, terrorists remained holed up in Ofakim. Famously, one group of terrorists held hostage Rachel Ederi and her late husband David. Security forces rescued the couple at their home. David died in February. He did not sustain injuries during the onslaught.
For days after that attack in Ofakim’s placid Ramat HaGefen neighborhood, local volunteers for the Haredi ZAKA first-response organization picked up body parts and cleaned bloodstains on suburban streets that looked like battlegrounds. The Ederi residence, a two-story semidetached, was among the many buildings whose walls were pocked by bullets and shrapnel throughout Ofakim.
Behind it, the chassis of two white pickup vans that the terrorists used to invade the town burned for hours after locals from an adjacent project building risked their lives to torch the vehicles and block the escape of the terrorists after they’d left the cars to go on their killing spree.
Osher Vaknin Eitan, a local social activist, congratulated Smotrich and Almog Cohen, an Ofakim-born lawmaker from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, who campaigned for compensation for Ofakim.
“I didn’t believe Almog would get his way against the treasury because we’re used to promises. But yesterday a decision was made and the residents of Ofakim got recognition and will receive compensation,” she wrote on X.
To some, the city’s exclusion from the Tekuma Authority was part of a long history of neglect in Ofakim, one of Israel’s poorest municipalities where the average salary in 2022 was more than 20 percent lower than the national average of roughly NIS 14,000 ($3,830). It has a socioeconomic rating of 3 out of 10.
Established in 1955 by immigrants, or olim, from Arab-speaking countries, Ofakim has a population growth rate of 5% but has not achieved the sort of transformation that has advanced other southern towns with similar origins including Sderot (7% growth). Both it and Dimona in 2022 climbed to a rating of 5 out of 10.
Ofakim has about 38,000 residents, many of whom belong to some of the poorest socioeconomic groups in Israeli society, including nearly 30% Haredim (compared to 11% nationally) and so many elderly Russian-speaking immigrants that they account for 45% of the city’s population over 65, according to the Adva Center, an institute focused on socioeconomics.
The decision to pay Ofakim residents the one-time grant follows the recommendations of a public committee that Smotrich convened to address the locals’ complaints, he said at a press conference in Ofakim Wednesday.
“The bravery of the city’s people is a message to our enemies about our endurance and stamina as a nation. You will not triumph over us,” he said.
Some 3,000 terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza on October 7, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting another 251. The onslaught triggered an ongoing military campaign in Gaza that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was designed to topple Hamas and retrieve the hostages.
The special grant for Ofakim, some locals say, still discriminates against it. “They gave us some pocket money to shut us up,” Tal Megera, a councilman in Ofakim, wrote on Facebook after the press conference. Locales that are included in the Tekuma Authority plan “get many times more what we got,” he added. “Sisters, brothers, we’ve been had,” he also wrote.
The news of the compensation for Ofakim closely followed the announcement by the Tekuma Authority that it was allocating NIS 350 million ($95.4 million) to the rehabilitation of Kibbutz Be’eri alone.
Megera had “hoped that the finance minister would follow up, after announcing the one-time grant, by announcing that Ofakim has entered the Tekuma Authority and receive meaningful, long-term investments as in Sderot and the rest of our region. I was wrong. We’ve been conned,” he wrote.
