Shutdown of public transport hampers reservists called up over long holiday weekend

Some reservists summoned for service amid the intensifying fighting with Lebanon’s Hezbollah were unable to reach their bases due to Israel’s prohibition on public transportation during the Jewish holidays and Shabbat, leaving those abroad without flights home and others with no rides to base.

With Israeli airlines grounded on weekends and holidays, many reservists who were abroad and whose flights with foreign carriers were canceled due to the recent escalation had no way home. Those in Israel over Rosh Hashanah still faced difficulties reaching base, as buses and trains have all but stopped since Wednesday evening when the Jewish new year celebration began and will not resume service again until Saturday evening.

Private initiatives sprung up on social media to meet the challenge, with Israelis offering reservists free rides to staging grounds on the Lebanese border. Brothers in Arms, the anti-government reservist group, was organizing transportation for reserve troops, according to the Kan public broadcaster.

The Tel Aviv municipality announced Friday that it would also offer free buses for soldiers over the weekend. The buses will travel from Tel Aviv to and from Haifa and Beersheba, near many IDF bases, with service beginning at 8 p.m. Friday and continuing through Saturday.

The service is part of Tel Aviv’s “We move on weekends” initiative that provides free rides in and around Tel Aviv over Shabbat when state public transportation does not operate.

The Defense Ministry slammed the Transportation Ministry for its repeated failures since Hamas’s October 7 attack to provide for reservists’ transportation on holidays and weekends.

“The IDF and defense ministry are busy with the war effort and defeating the enemy,” it said in a statement Friday. “The transportation ministry is expected to chip in.”

The Transport Ministry, in turn, said it had provided the army with dozens of buses to shuttle soldiers, and was prepared to provide thousands more.

“Every claim and objection vis a vis the reservists should be forwarded to the IDF,” the ministry charged.

The Calcalist business daily cited Transportation Ministry officials who sought to shift the blame to the Defense Ministry, saying the latter had not declared a national state of emergency that would allow buses and trains to run over the weekend.

The newspaper said, however, that the army’s shuttle service was inadequate and that the Transportation Ministry could activate trains and buses of its own accord, without a Defense Ministry directive.

The issue of public transportation on Shabbat and the Jewish holidays has long been a contentious issues, with ultra-Orthodox parties — often parliamentary kingmakers, and key members of the current government — adamant that no state-run buses, trains or airlines operate on those days.

The rule also affects Israel’s three main airlines — El Al, Arkia and Israir. Critics have called on the government to utilize its “golden share” in El Al, the largest of the three, to force the airline to operate flights on Shabbat.

Transportation Minister Miri Regev — whose deputy, Uri Maklev, hails from the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party — has come under fire for cleaving to the longstanding rule over the pleas of soldiers and their families.

After the war began on October 7 — when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages — Regev had allowed trains to operate over the weekend, but stopped the program in mid-November.

Regev has also been criticized for her failure to prevent flight cancellations en masse by foreign carriers spooked by Iran’s threats and missile attacks.

Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Tuesday led several large airlines, including Germany’s Lufthansa, to suspend their Israel routes. Israel saw similar waves of cancellations amid a threatened Iranian attack in July and an actualized one in April, as well as months-long cancelations following October 7.

Many passengers were deterred from shifting to Israeli airlines, which have continued flying but hiked up ticket rates as the competition has melted away, Calcalist reported Thursday.