The government failed in its management of civilian affairs - understanding what the public needs were and adequately meeting them - throughout the Israel-Hamas War, and especially at its start, the State Comptroller’s Office announced in a new report on the failures of October 7, published on Wednesday.
State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman levied heavy criticism at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, marking them as responsible for civilian front failures since the war broke out almost two years ago.
Establishing the mechanisms for such emergency situations is not solely a wartime responsibility, but should be upheld even when active use of it is not required, he wrote, adding that this had been tended to, notes the report, the price that civilians have paid in the interim wouldn’t have been so high.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians experienced the failures of the Israeli government firsthand,” reads the report, the data of which was collected between January and May 2024. The report charged that the government’s management of civilian affairs should’ve been not just effective, but streamlined under a competent authority.
The attack led to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands from their homes in the North and South, while hundreds of thousands of reservists have been continuously drafted, business owners face a financial quagmire with no exit route, physical and psychological challenges abound, and the education system failed in evacuated communities.
The Comptroller found as well that the situational assessment provided before the war by the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA), which is nestled under the Defense Ministry, that readiness was at a medium-to-good level, was proven, through the test of time, to not be the case, and that much greater improvement is needed.
When the Second Lebanon War ended in 2006, the government was due to organize and regulate the division of responsibilities relating to the civilian front. As the Comptroller has found, this had not been done by October 7.
The government granted the defense minister in 2007 the responsibility for civilian affairs in emergency situations - including wartime - but no tangible responsibilities were passed on, including the authority to hand out orders to other government offices on civilian affairs.
Despite this, and the various other bodies under the military and within the defense ministry itself that do handle civilian affairs - like NEMA and the Home Front Command, along with three different Comptroller reports between 2015 and 2020 - none of these responsibilities were streamlined.
NEMA was well funded - though the budget did decrease over the years - but in practice, the Comptroller noted, it had not functioned either as a national body nor as an emergency one, “despite its name.” The Home Front Command also wasn’t the proper address for a broad regulator, as it didn’t meet the needs of the evacuees, the roles of its officers weren’t clear, and it dealt more with the evacuations themselves.
This predictable catastrophe of the lack of organization meant that over the years - and today - “the government’s ability to provide the services that the people actually need is crippled,” reads the report.
Netanyahu as authority responsible to see deficiencies, prepare the country
Netanyahu, who has been in power consecutively since 2009, with a break of about a year-and-a-half, 13 years, was the authority responsible for seeing to these deficiencies and making sure the country is ready, charged the Comptroller. In the period when he wasn’t the prime minister, and Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid were, no advancements on the issue were made either.
But this responsibility didn’t just fall to the prime minister. The Comptroller points a large blaming finger at the Defense Ministry - including Gallant and others who preceded him - for not regulating and formalizing the statuses of NEMA and the Home Front Command.
The Comptroller also laid a great deal of responsibility on the Finance Ministry, headed by Bezalel Smotrich, who, as head of the socio-economic cabinet, failed to implement through it the government’s decision to establish and operate a civilian control center, tasked with coalescing and unifying all the civilian efforts across various ministries.
“The cabinet effectively refrained from its most critical duty, the government handed it - managing civilian affairs during a time when the State is at war that has far-reaching and far-flung effects on the home front and the population,” reads the report.
The survey found that Smotrich barely convened the socio-economic cabinet, and when it did sit, it did not discuss the civilian command and control center, the operations of relevant government ministries, nor the very many civilian needs presented before them by representatives of ministers - such as issues relating to employment and housing. It also found that the cabinet did not publish any decisions.
The report specifically criticizes the individuals within the Finance Ministry that would’ve had the means to advance these projects - like legal professionals, the wages commissioner, who is responsible for public sector wages, as well as within the Civil Service Commission - under the Prime Minister’s Office - which oversees civil servant appointments.
The survey found that none of these figures provided the necessary response and problem-solving mechanisms needed to create and advance the civilian command and control center.
It was in this manner that the mechanism the government set out to provide fell flat. Englman noted that Smotrich should’ve reported back to the government as soon as he realized the operation failed, rather than letting it slowly die.
The Finance Ministry acknowledged the report's findings. It further noted that the legal and bureaucratic mazes that exist in Israeli governance were a massive obstacle in the face of immediate responses.
Concurrently, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Yossi Shelley, had been charged near the start of the war to fill and manage the Financial-Social Headquarters in the PMO, the central staff unit charged with coordinating economic and social policies for the country, whose mandate spans across multiple ministries. It was established in April 2012 following recommendations by a committee to reexamine the PMO.
Essentially, its job is to make sure that coordination between ministries and the actualization of policies runs smoothly.
Shelley has insisted, though the report notes, that this is not the responsibility of the Headquarters - which the Comptroller said is inaccurate. The Headquarters also only launched a forum of all the directors-general in the ministries over two months after the war broke out. The Comptroller’s Office rebuked Shelley for not doing this immediately.
This forum had not been properly established before the war in any official capacity; even the directors-general themselves didn’t know about it. By December 2023, the forum had been convened 27 times. From December onwards, “at a time when the country was at peak fighting in the North and South,” the times it met were minimal at best, the Comptroller’s Office found.
And, when it did convene, the PMO did not invite Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara - who is traditionally invited to such meetings to provide legal counsel and ensure legal compliance. It also did not invite any representatives from the Finance Ministry’s budget department or the Accountant-General.
This forum also did not reach any decisions or provide comprehensive responses to specific challenges, hindrances and needs in the inter-ministerial plane.
In practice, there were different governmental bodies tasked with providing an overall picture of the situation, but none functioned fully while sometimes overlapping in their work, which led to a complete lack of understanding of what the needs and lacks are.
Englman pointed out that as it became clear that this widespread failure was not being treated, the responsibility to tighten the reins fell to Netanyahu.
The report called on Netanyahu, Smotrich and Defense Minister Israel Katz, as well as the PMO director-general, and the heads of the National Security Council and NEMA to establish a comprehensive and high-quality system for managing the civilian aspects of the war. “We cannot waste any more time.”
The PMO, in an official response issued in the evening, called the report a "preoccupation with trivialities that lack any substantive significance," and said that Netanyahu denies the "ridiculous consequences" that arise from the "irrelevant document."
It further posited that the timing of the report, just as the army is preparing a takeover of Gaza City, is "questionable."
By its assessment, the report "ignores the fact that Israel was attacked on seven fronts and entered into an existential war it has never known, and with no precedential conflict to model a response after." Given this context, "the government succeeded in providing immediate responses to the best of its ability."
It also pointed out that the report is based on incomplete facts and "doesn't pay homage to the massive productivity the government has done since the war began."