State Comptroller and Public Complaints Ombudsman Matanyahu Engelman published today (Tuesday) a detailed report on public complaints regarding the conduct of state authorities on the home front in the first weeks of the war.
At the same time, the State Comptroller is carrying out an audit on the home front, and as he has already announced - he intends to open an audit of the security issues both before the massacre and in the conduct of the political and military echelons that day and afterward.
According to the special report of the Public Complaints Ombudsman, during the first 43 days of the war, 1,329 inquiries related to the emergency situation were received in the hotline that the commission opened, with an emphasis on residents in the conflict lines in the south and north.
For 40% of the inquiries, an immediate response was given in the form of information and guidance. For 68% of the complaints that the commission finished investigating were fully addressed.
The government ministries and state institutions that received the largest number of requests were the Home Front Command (130 requests), the National Insurance Institute (119), the Ministry of Labor (74), the Tax Authority (70) and the Ministry of National Security (57).
All requests received dealt with the residents’ difficulty in receiving service from the state authorities and in matters directly related to the war situation, such as protection, activity of educational institutions, eligibility for special grants and treatment of evacuees.
The field for which the most inquiries were received was public service. After that, a large number of applications were received for compensation and grants, education, home defense, evacuation and treatment of evacuees, and more.
The report shows that in contrast to normal days, during the war more women filed complaints (53.6% compared to 43.4% in the annual report for 2022). Also noted was that the implementation of an economic assistance program for the public was delayed for a long time, and this constituted a fundamental failure.
This is even truer for residents in the private sector of the south and the north, including the self-employed, who described the reality of their lives under conditions of uncertainty to the state auditor and the ombudsman: they suffer from a lack of income and, on the other hand, are obligated to pay expenses such as employee wages, suppliers and credit repayments to banks. The lack of an economic assistance program for the public at the very beginning of the war, along with the evacuation of the residents from their homes, created a situation where hundreds of thousands of citizens became a needy population.
Engelman stated that, "The Israeli government failed to take care of the home front in the first weeks of the Swords of Iron War. There was no justification for this. The lack of implementation of an economic aid program for the public at the very beginning of the operation, along with the evacuation of the residents from their homes, created a situation where hundreds of thousands of citizens became a needy population. The public complaints department at the State Comptroller's Office immediately opened a hotline and reached the sites of the evacuees in order to respond to those who fell “between the cracks” of the government ministries and the various authorities. The ministers and ministries must draw conclusions from the public complaints and work to improve the service to the citizens of the country, especially during this emergency."