The government and IDF entered the Israel-Hamas War without an approved national operational plan for evacuating civilians and were forced to manage the displacement of more than 200,000 Israelis through an ad hoc system that left local authorities improvising under fire, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman said in a report published Tuesday.
According to the report on civilian evacuation and absorption during the first months of the war, some 210,000 residents from the North and South were evacuated or self-evacuated within the first three months of the fighting – a scale far beyond what existing national frameworks were designed to handle.
Yet, as of October 7, Israel had zero approved national operational evacuation plans and had conducted no emergency drills for a mass civilian displacement scenario, the comptroller found.
The audit – conducted between December 2023 and July 2024 across 13 evacuating municipalities and 14 absorbing municipalities, alongside the Home Front Command, the Defense Ministry’s National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA), and multiple civilian ministries – concluded that longstanding disputes between the defense and interior ministries over responsibility for evacuation planning remained unresolved at the political level, including after Englman personally raised the issue with the prime minister.
That gap, he said, contributed to what the report describes as “complete disorder” in the evacuation of frontline communities in the war’s opening days.
A lack of coordination and structure
In some cases, municipalities were unable to coordinate with the IDF during active evacuation operations, forcing residents to leave under fire without structured assistance. In the South – with the exception of several communities in the Eshkol Regional Council evacuated during and immediately after the October 7 attacks – evacuations were carried out largely by local authorities themselves.
Absorption of evacuees was likewise conducted without a unified framework. According to the report, evacuees from Kiryat Shmona were ultimately dispersed across approximately 300 separate hospitality facilities nationwide, complicating efforts to provide education, welfare, and medical services and increasing what the comptroller described as “unnecessary suffering” and uncertainty among displaced residents.
The government’s decision in October 2023 to base the national absorption effort primarily on hotels – rather than on public facilities such as schools and community centers as envisioned under the long-standing “Hotel Guests” evacuation framework – reflected both the anticipated duration of displacement and the psychological needs of affected communities. But the updated version of that framework, completed in 2022 after roughly 18 months of staff work, was never brought for cabinet approval due to budgetary objections from the Finance Ministry.
As a result, no updated national plan for civilian evacuation and absorption had been approved by the time the war began.
Similarly, the joint national “Safe Distance” evacuation plan – intended to provide up to 21 days of temporary housing for roughly 45,000 residents living within 4 km. of the Gaza border and 5 km. of the Northern border – had been approved at the deputy ministerial level in 2021 but was never ratified by government ministries or the security cabinet, leaving it in draft form as of October 7.
Neither the national nor IDF versions of the plan included provisions for evacuating nearby cities such as Kiryat Shmona or Sderot, the report notes.
Recommendations for changes in operations
Compounding those structural gaps, the government lacked a centralized digital system capable of managing real-time data on the roughly quarter-million Israelis displaced during the early weeks of the war. Even six months into the conflict, updated information had been collected on only about 50% of evacuees, according to the report.
That absence of integrated data, Englman wrote, directly impaired the government’s ability to deliver coordinated services and oversee spending, including approximately NIS 5.26 billion spent on hotel accommodations through July 2024, with evacuee data sourced primarily from hotels rather than from government registries.
The report also found that the Education Ministry lacked updated information on the whereabouts of roughly 10,000 displaced students seven months after the attacks.
Looking ahead, Englman called on the government to formally delineate responsibility between civilian ministries for evacuation and absorption, update and approve national operational plans, and develop an integrated information system capable of supporting the displacement of “tens of thousands of civilians” in future emergencies.
In response, the Defense Ministry said NEMA had led interministerial coordination from the outset of the war, including the establishment of a dedicated command center and the evacuation of approximately 124,000 residents from the South and North to dozens of hotels nationwide.
The IDF said Home Front Command personnel – roughly 1,000 soldiers and reservists – deployed to assist both evacuating and absorbing municipalities in establishing local command centers and delivering services in accordance with the Safe Distance evacuation framework approved by NEMA.