Welfare System Performance During the War and Policy Proposals

The full research is available in Hebrew only.

With the approach of the one-year anniversary of the October 7 War, the Taub Center published a study examining the performance of the welfare system during the war. The study reveals that the welfare system was unprepared to handle the complex challenges posed by the war and the scale of the needs of the affected populations, largely due to years of underfunding, significant shortages of social workers, and the unequal distribution of financial resources among different localities. However, the study found that the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs and local social services departments responded quickly to the war and made adjustments that enabled staff to address some of the challenges they faced.

Even before the outbreak of the war, the welfare system was grappling with a severe “welfare deficit” — a significant gap between the needs of those reliant on its services and its capacity to provide adequate solutions. This gap severely hindered the system’s ability to address the difficulties brought by the war:

• The welfare system was quickly burdened with tens of thousands of new clients, including people who experienced the attack firsthand, those whose relatives were killed or kidnapped, and many residents evacuated from their homes in the south and north, all in addition to over a million regular service users.
• Despite the impressive efforts of social workers and the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affaris staff, the lack of funding and trained personnel meant that the assistance provided to victims during the first six months of the war was only partial. Professionals often had to rely on volunteers, civil society organizations, and philanthropic funds.
• During this period, the government allocated NIS 9.5 billion to welfare and social security issues to help address the war’s damages and the growing needs.

Ongoing operations in social service departments

Prior to the war, there were 747 unfilled social worker positions in local social service departments. Although additional positions were approved after the war began, staffing them was challenging, and the number of unfilled positions rose to around 900.

• During the war, 41% of social service departments in localities that took in evacuees reported staffing shortages.
• In Metula and the Eshkol Regional Council, only 37% of social worker positions were filled, and in Kiryat Shmona and the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, more than a quarter of the positions were unstaffed.
• In the early weeks of the war, one of the most difficult tasks for social workers in the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs was delivering information, often heartbreaking news, to the families of victims and those killed in the massacre of October 7. Despite the lack of prior training and preparedness for such a complex situation, the system established to handle this task managed to do so successfully.
• Social workers struggled to balance caring for evacuees and war victims with continuing to serve their regular clients.

Care for evacuees

The study describes a chaotic situation in hotels during the early days of the war, with a lack of information, severe staffing shortages, lack of coordination among various government agencies, and the absence of an overarching coordinating body. The prolonged stay in hotels created serious social problems, including sexual assaults.

• The Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs reported 75 cases of sexual assault in the evacuee hotels, 93% of which involved minors.
• A major issue in providing care for evacuees in hotels was the lack of information about their needs. The high turnover of caregivers, many of whom were volunteers, and the absence of a coordinating body made it difficult to track the care provided. Attempts to implement technological tools for reporting on evacuees’ needs and care were unsuccessful.
• The Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs cared for orphans of the massacre and children who were released from captivity in Gaza. Despite significant resources invested in intensive professional care, many of these children still struggled to reintegrate into their families and communities after months of treatment. Additionally, half of them abandoned the crucial mental health care they needed.
• The new challenges created by the war led social workers at all levels — from the central office to regional offices and local social service departments — to develop a variety of creative approaches to assist evacuees in hotels and within the community.
• The welfare systems, led by the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs, made significant efforts to address the war’s impact: ensuring the safe evacuation of victims, creating mechanisms to secure victims’ income and compensate them for their losses, investing resources in returning children and their families, establishing administrative frameworks, recruiting social workers, and developing plans to deal with the complex situation of the evacuees.

The study presented a number of policy recommendations to address current and future welfare system challenges.

Recommendations for future emergency situations

1. Establishing a pool of volunteer social workers who can be mobilized immediately during emergencies.
2. Implementing a secure, efficient, and user-friendly digital system for collecting data on clients to support social workers in emergencies.
3. Creating a comprehensive evacuee care procedure that clearly defines a coordinating body and integrates all levels of the system—from local authorities to regional offices and the national headquarters. The plan should specify roles and responsibilities for emergency situations, including clearly defined authorities, communication channels, and workflows with other agencies.

Current and long-term proposals

1. Increasing the welfare budget: Expand the budget of the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs and strengthen welfare infrastructures to ensure adequate services for the entire population.
2. Improving working conditions for social workers: Recruit additional staff for the welfare system, improve working conditions and salaries for social workers, and ensure they have the necessary support to handle complex and stressful situations.
3. Equalizing social services funding: Reevaluate the current funding model to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources among local authorities, gradually reducing the matching-fund requirement (self-contribution by local authorities) for those directly affected by the war and in disadvantaged areas.
4. Unifying the welfare system: Consolidate all welfare systems under a single Ministry for Social Welfare, which can coordinate and manage all activities efficiently and make optimal use of allocated budgets.

* Prof. John Gal, Principal Researcher and Chair, Welfare Policy Program, Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel; School of Social Work and Social Welfare, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shavit Ben-Porat, Researcher, Taub Center. Yael Ovadia, Research Assistant, Taub Center. This research was published in September 2024 and is available in full on the Taub Center website (in Hebrew).