Evacuees from the same communities were split between multiple hotels, sometimes in different cities, fracturing the social networks that might have helped them cope.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
When the residents of Sderot fled their city on and after October 7, 2023, they scattered across 165 different hotels and guesthouses.
The 23,000 residents of Kiryat Shmona, evacuated two weeks later from the Lebanese border, ended up distributed across approximately 300 accommodation facilities in 100 separate towns.
Families from the same street found themselves hours apart.
By early November 2023, approximately 246,000 Israelis had been displaced from their homes in the country’s north and south — around a quarter of a million people in motion, with no unified government system to track, coordinate, or serve them.
A comprehensive audit by Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, released Tuesday, reconstructed what that chaos looked like from the inside.
The State Comptroller regularly reviews Israel’s preparedness and the effectiveness of government policies.
Englman also released reports highlighting failures in the evacuation of frontline communities and how their children lost two years of education.
“At the outbreak of the war, the government did not have a computer system that would allow it to centralise and manage information on about a quarter of a million residents who had been evacuated from their homes,” Englman said.
“This was a failure that directly affected the ability to implement, in the weeks following the outbreak of the war, a rapid, orderly, and positive treatment system for a vast population.”
Large-Scale Improvisation
The numbers illuminate the scale of the improvisation required. Eilat, a Red Sea resort city of 53,000 residents, was earmarked in pre-war planning to absorb 57,000 evacuees — more people than it already housed.
The Tamar Regional Council, a sparsely populated desert district in Israel’s south, ultimately absorbed more than eight times its own population.
Together, the two jurisdictions housed more than half of all evacuees received by the 14 absorbing authorities the audit examined.
Yet neither received advance notice that evacuees were coming. Not one of the 14 absorbing authorities was officially informed by any government body — before or after the war began — of how many people were headed their way, where they were from, or what they would need.
Most learned of incoming evacuees from hotel managers, from officials in evacuated towns who called counterparts directly, or from evacuees arriving at municipal offices.
The report described a complete absence of the coordinating authority that pre-war plans had promised.
The National Emergency Authority, known by its Hebrew acronym RACHEL — which falls under the Defence Ministry — never resolved with the Interior Ministry which of them was responsible for managing a mass civilian displacement. When the war came, both stepped back.
“We found complete disarray in the evacuation of the communities,” Englman said.
“The placement in accommodation facilities was not done according to an organised plan, but according to availability. The principle of preserving communality was not maintained.”
‘Crumbs Scattered Across the Country’
Evacuees from the same communities were split between multiple hotels, sometimes in different cities, fracturing the social networks that might have helped them cope.
When different groups shared a hotel, friction was common: donations delivered to one community generated resentment in another.
A family from Kiryat Shmona quoted in the audit described receiving separate hotel assignments for each family member — “we were essentially crumbs scattered across the country.”
In Ashkelon, Israel’s sixth-largest city, the breakdown was near-total. Only around 5 percent of the city’s 70,000 eligible residents reached government-funded hotel accommodation.
The remaining 68,000 received housing grants worth NIS 328 million ($105 million) with no verification that they had actually evacuated.
The Interior Ministry issued no binding procedure defining what an evacuating authority was supposed to do.
Data management was equally chaotic. A government tracking system called “Noah’s Ark” was operated by the Home Front Command for just ten days, logging only around 9,000 evacuees before being abandoned.
Six months into the war, a replacement system called “Yachad” held data on only about half of all evacuees — and contained no information on children evacuated with their families.
“In the absence of an orderly information infrastructure, it was not possible to obtain a comprehensive picture of the situation,” Englman said.
State expenditure on hotel and guesthouse accommodation alone reached NIS 5.26 billion ($1.69 billion) by July 2024 — paid largely on data supplied by the hotels themselves rather than by any independent government verification.
Into the vacuum stepped volunteers. Across Israel, civil society organisations, community groups, and individual citizens mobilized within hours to provide food, clothing, psychological support, transport, and basic supplies the government was unable to deliver.
Twelve of the 14 absorbing authorities established volunteer operations centres. Without this mobilisation, the audit found, authorities in several cities would have been unable to meet evacuees’ most basic needs.
One evacuee from Kibbutz Be’eri captured the prevailing sentiment in a focus group conducted by the Comptroller’s office: “If it weren’t for the donations and the organisations helping us, we would have collapsed, physically collapsed. There is no state. The state doesn’t exist, it isn’t a factor.”
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