Local leaders from Israel’s North and South emphasized the need for solutions to immediate problems for evacuees and residents in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the 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, as she emphasized that there are no nursing workers, healthcare professionals, restaurants, cultural events, cleaners, and more in Israel’s North.
Langleben touched on plans that Ze’ev Elkin, the minister in the Finance Ministry for rehabilitation in the North and South, described earlier in the conference, saying that while many plans are focused on the long term, the question now is “What happens tomorrow morning?”
He outlined a number of challenges faced by residents of the area, including a lack of schools, exhausted teachers, and residents who were not evacuated 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 there is no time for the government’s decisions to continue slowly making their way through committees.
Michal Uziyahu, head of the Eshkol Regional Council, which was devastated in Hamas’s attack, urged decision makers to change their thinking regarding 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 region’s complexity and the trauma it experienced into consideration.
Eshkol will be an emblem of growth
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 in the South – that is 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.
At the conference, the IDI emphasized 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 but emphasized that due to constraints on the survey, 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.
Forty-two percent of evacuees in the North reported that their work hours were cut, compared to 37% in the South and 25% of the general population. Around 44% of evacuees from the North and South also reported that their household income was harmed during the war.