Local heads call for urgent solutions as North and South struggle post-Hamas attack
Local leaders from Israel's South and North emphasized the need for solutions to immediate problems for evacuees and residents in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war.
Local leaders from Israel's South and North emphasized the need for solutions to immediate problems for evacuees and residents in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war.
'Everything you remember from the North from before the war does not exist,' Asaf Langleben, head of the Upper Galilee Regional Council, said, quoting a resident of his council on Wednesday at the Israel Democracy Institute's (IDI) Eli Hurvitz Conference on Economy and Society 2025.
'I find myself saying 'there isn't,'' he continued to quote her, adding that she emphasized that there are no nursing workers, healthcare professionals, restaurants, cultural events, cleaners, and more in Israel's North.
He touched on plans Minister in the Finance Ministry for rehabilitation in the North and South Ze'ev Elkin described earlier in the conference, saying that while many plans are focused on the long term, the question is now 'what happens tomorrow morning?'
He outlined a number of challenges faced by residents of the area, including a lack of schools, exhausted teachers, residents who were not evacuated, and who are still reeling from living in the region during the war and intense fighting in the North.
He urged the government to incentivize companies to relocate to the north immediately, stressing that there is no time for the government decisions to continue to slowly make their way through committees.
Michal Uziyahu, head of the Eshkol Regional Council, which was devastated in the Hamas attack on Israel, urged decision makers to change their thinking about the rehabilitation of the South.
She urged them to challenge conceptions of the wide impacts of current broad plans, asking that they look beyond the per-capita data and take the complexity of the region and trauma it experienced into consideration.
While 80% of the Hamas massacre took place within the Eshkol Regional Council, residents refuse to be defined by the disaster, she said, adding that Eshkol will be an emblem of growth.
The residents of Eshkol are going to return home, she said. 'We are determined.'
In contrast to the municipal leaders, Elkin emphasized the importance of planning large projects for the long term, saying that these are the kind of advancements the government is not normally able to advance due to a lack of budgets.
He also said that the government is planning to double the population of the Tkuma region - the region of the south undergoing rehabilitation, within a decade, stressing that this requires an even larger investment in quality of life in order to make actual improvements for a growing population.
The IDI emphasized at the conference that the National Insurance Institute has not enabled the Central Bureau of Statistics to make statistics about evacuees available, preventing researchers from being able to gauge the scope of the impacts on these populations.
In light of this, the IDI completed its own survey. Due to constraints on the survey, the IDI emphasized that the poll has a relatively large maximum sampling error, with a 12% margin of error and 90% confidence interval.
Some 22% of evacuees from the north reported that they were fired, closed their business, or were put on unpaid leave because of the war, much higher than the 7% of evacuees from the South and 4% of the general population, the survey found.
In the North, 42% of evacuees reported that their work hours were cut, 37% of evacuees from the South reported this, and 25% of the general population said their hours were cut.
Around 44% of evacuees from the North and South reported that the income of their household was harmed during the war.
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