Yonatan Bassi, who headed the SELA Disengagement Authority, said Sunday that Jews who were evicted by the government from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005 were to blame for the failure to rehabilitate them because of their refusal to communicate with the government. In his first round of testimony before a state commission of inquiry on those failures, Bassi also said, "The state owes this to those evicted, it has to bring them back to living productive lives. Regardless of the debate on whether the disengagement was the right thing or not, they made the greatest sacrifice."
The evictees were not ready to point their fingers at Bassi, who took a lot of abuse as a result of his assignment, but insisted on receiving the rehabilitation due them. One of the evictees, who claimed to have made contact with the government, said, "If the situation is such that less than 20 percent came back to work this means a total failure!”