The IDF has begun preparing for a potential war with Hezbollah in northern Israel, launching Operation Steady Anchor to protect tens of thousands of Israelis who do not have shelters or safe rooms.
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The Home Front Command has used the last few weeks to promote an emergency program to establish shelters for residents who live in old buildings that do not contain a protected space and where the time to reach a public shelter is longer than the warning time of an incoming rocket, which is around a minute on average in cities such as Haifa.
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Older buildings in northern Israeli cities do not have safe rooms
(Photo: Sharon Tzur)
According to the plan, which was formulated and budgeted in the last two months, dozens of mass shelters were established, mainly in underground parking lots, to which the residents without protection will be directed. They will stay there for relatively short periods, from a few hours to a few days, depending on the need.
The defense establishment has completed a major procurement process that included tenders to provide the logistical solutions to set up the plan if it goes into effect on short notice with the outbreak of war against Hezbollah. Among these logistics are cleaning services for these complexes and thousands of packages of non-perishable food and water.
In a scenario of an all-out war against the Lebanese terrorist group, the Home Front Command will also oversee the transportation of the citizens, including the elderly and the disabled.
In the past, the defense establishment debated whether to set up emergency tents for unprotected populations in northern cities in safe and distant areas, such as the Aravah in the Negev Desert, but this plan was dropped, in part because it is understood that residents would prefer to stay relatively close to their homes.
Since many hotels have been full since October with evacuees from the war zones in the Western Negev and the Galilee, the possibility of sheltering the unprotected population in northern hotels appears unlikely.
"We have now purchased about 80,000 packages of food for the benefit of the program," noted a military official who is familiar with the operation. "Transfer to hotels is not relevant because there are perhaps 10,000 available rooms left in Israel, which would barely be enough for a quarter of Safed's population. We have strengthened protection solutions in cities near the border such as Nahariya and Kiryat Shmona, but we won't now scatter thousands of mobile shelters on the old streets of the Krayot or Akko – it's expensive and irrelevant."
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IDF Northern Command head Major General Ori Gordin, met with the security coordinators of northern municipalities
(Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)
The program also includes temporary accommodation facilities, beds and chairs for the residents' well-being. The Home Front Command emphasized that the plan should tackled on the national level and also include similar solutions for unprotected residents in central Israel.
The IDF realized in the last four months that Hezbollah's weapons arsenal also includes many precision rockets, some of which have a flat trajectory such as advanced and long-range anti-tank missiles, which reached a distance of about 10 kilometers from the border area to the summit of Mount Meron. Some of them also do not require a continuous line of sight between the launcher and the target, and Hezbollah's precision missiles were able to bypass hills and explode on precise remote targets in Kiryat Shemona and its surroundings.
In addition, since the beginning of the war, many dozens of suicide drones have been launched from Lebanon into Israel. Most of them were intercepted, but some were not detected at all or exploded in Israeli territory.
The Home Front Command created an engineering specification as part of the plan that determines how any underground parking lot can serve as part of a mass shelter. The IDF also says that information about the shelters will be provided to the citizens, who will then decide if they wish to move to them.
IDF Northern Command head Major General Ori Gordin met Saturday with the security coordinators of the localities of the Mata Asher and Ma'ale Yosef regional councils in the north. "We are preparing contingency plans to launch an attack in Lebanon. Our commitment, mine, is to change the security situation so that the residents can be returned home," he told them.