State comptroller assails government failures on home front after Oct. 7 onslaught
Long delays in implementation of economic assistance program for evacuees meant ‘hundreds of thousands of citizens became a needy population’
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman has accused the government of failing to adequately deal with the numerous civilian problems that arose on the home front during the first six weeks of the ongoing war, and said in a report released on Tuesday that the functioning of government ministries and agencies was severely deficient.
A hotline set up by the Public Complaints Commission of the State Comptroller’s Office to address these problems has received numerous complaints by citizens who were unable to get government assistance for difficulties arising from the war, including financial problems for small business owners and households, and bomb shelters in poor states of repair, among other issues.
“The Israeli government failed to take care of the home front in the first weeks of the Swords of Iron war. There was no justification for this,” said Englman following publication of the report.
“The lack of implementation of economic assistance programs for the public at the beginning of the operation, along with the evacuation of residents from their homes, resulted in a situation in which hundreds of thousands of citizens became a needy population.”
Englman noted that the Public Complaints Commission was able to resolve many of the complaints received on its hotline relatively easily, and said that this “obliges the ministers and the ministries to draw lessons from the public’s complaints and act to improve service to the country’s citizens, especially during this emergency.”
According to the report, the commission’s hotline received 1,329 requests for assistance in the first 43 days of the war, 40% of which were addressed immediately simply by providing information and directing the individual to the relevant authority.
In total, the commission was able to fully resolve 68% of the requests it received.
“The common denominator of the requests received lies both in the difficulty in receiving service from state authorities and in matters directly related to the war, such as [bomb] shelters, schooling, eligibility for special grants, and the treatment of evacuees,” the report found.
The State Comptroller’s Office noted in particular that the implementation of an economic assistance plan for those affected by the war was significantly delayed, and represented “a substantive failing.”
Small business owners and self-employed people described to the State Comptroller’s Office the problems they faced due to a lack of income while bearing their usual costs of employee salaries, payments to suppliers and bank credit repayments.
“The lack of implementation of an economic aid program for the public at the very beginning of the war, along with the evacuation of people from their homes, created a situation where hundreds of thousands of citizens became a needy population,” the report found.
The document states that information regarding all the government’s activities for supporting the home front was not made available to the public in an organized manner, making it unnecessarily difficult for citizens to obtain assistance in dealing with their concerns.
The report says the appointment of a “civilian spokesperson” to provide relevant information on a daily basis on the government’s programs and assistance for wartime needs and problems would significantly help alleviate this problem.
Addressing flaws with the evacuation program for residents of the south and north who were moved away from the battle lines with Hamas and Hezbollah, the report noted that there was a shortage of government representatives at the places where the evacuees were accommodated at the beginning of the war.
As a result, evacuees found it hard to deal with difficulties in their housing conditions and a lack of income, and were also left uninformed regarding what they could obtain from the government as evacuees, a situation exacerbated for some by a lack of digital literacy.
In one example provided by the report, a resident of Afula phoned the commission hotline to complain that there was no lighting by the public bomb shelter closest to her and that the stairs to the shelter were broken.
The complainant said that she had contacted the Afula municipal authority but that nothing had been done, leaving her in a state of anxiety due to the ongoing rocket barrages.
After the commission contacted the Afula municipal authority, the problems were fixed within 24 hours, the report said.
Another example provided by the report was that of a resident of the southern city of Netivot and her child who suffered from depression.
Their home was damaged by a rocket attack, and the windows were blown out, leaving them with ongoing psychological trauma. But since Netivot was not included in the list of cities to be evacuated, the family had to pay for its own stay in Eilat and returned to Netivot shortly afterward.
The commission contacted the welfare department in Netivot, which in turn organized a five-day respite for this family at a hotel in Eilat to help them cope with their trauma and provided them with financial assistance.
