Thousands of residents return to homes near Gaza as state ends hotel funding for some
Around 3,700 Israelis go back to towns they left on October 7; residents of 10 communities badly damaged in Hamas attack have housing for at least another year
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Some 3,700 people from communities near the Gaza border area returned to their homes on Thursday following the government’s decision to no longer pay for their hotel accommodations, the Tekuma Authority said in a statement.
The final date for state-funded accommodations was set to August 15 following several extensions of the accommodation period, according to a spokesperson for the Tekuma Authority, which is the government’s arm for rehabilitating the Gaza border area.
The return follows the High Court of Justice’s decision to reject a petition by some residents of Sderot, who argued that they were too traumatized to return to the city, where terrorists murdered dozens of people on October 7.
The Tekuma Authority said nearly all Israelis evacuated from their homes near the Gaza Strip in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack have returned. More than 80 percent of the southern Israeli region’s 50,000-plus population had moved back by July, it said.
Residents of 10 kibbutz communities that were badly damaged in the Hamas attack will be given temporary housing for at least another year in various locations as their communities undergo renovations and reconstruction, the Authority said.
One of the Sderot petitioners, Binyamin Pinchasov, told i24News that he and the other petitioners felt abandoned by the government.
“It’s like we’ve been cast aside, it’s like we don’t exist, nobody takes care of anything for us,” he said.
Of the 3,700 individuals, 1,900 are from Sderot and the others belong to local regional councils including Sha’ar Hanegev (730) and Eshkol (400). Residents of those locales also petitioned the High Court of Justice, which has not intervened with the decision to end their state-funded accommodations.
The bulk of the population of Sderot, a city of about 30,000 residents, is back home and has been living there for months.
“The return of residents to their homes in accordance with a cabinet resolution from June 16 is being carried out after prior notice and in the absence of security threats preventing the move,” Tekuma said in a statement.
The October 7 onslaught saw Hamas terrorists rampage through southern Israel and kill some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnap 251. The Israel Defense Forces say 111 hostages remain in Gaza, 39 of whom have been declared dead.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 40,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 16,000 combatants in battle as of July, and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
The war has drawn in Iran-backed Hamas allies in the region, including the powerful Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which has been trading near-daily fire with Israeli forces since October 8 in support of Hamas.
Tens of thousands of residents on either side of the Israel-Lebanon border have been displaced by the violence, and the vast majority have yet to return.
So far, the skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 18 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 410 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria.
In Lebanon, another 71 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have been killed.
AFP contributed to this report.
