Surviving October 7th: A Testimony of Crisis and Support
“On October 7th, I was staying at my son’s house in Sderot. The terrorists were outside the house, the neighbor here got a burst of bullets to the stomach. We tried to call the police countless times, but they couldn’t arrive. I had just undergone lymphoma surgery on October 1st, and the stress was so intense that my body couldn’t cope with it. When we arrived at the hotel, I developed an infection and was hospitalized. The confusion was immense, we didn’t understand at all what we were entitled to, what we weren’t entitled to. The girls here at the rights realization station are like angels. Simply angels. Our minds weren’t free to deal with it, and they were here for us. They were like oxygen.”
The story of Yafa Malka is one of thousands of stories of evacuees we met through the ‘Mobile Units for Rights Realization’. Now that the program has come to an end, it’s a good opportunity to talk about it: The rights realization mobile units, which we established in partnership with the Ministry of Welfare and Social Security and the Pitchon Lev organization, went into the field shortly after the war broke out, when about 200,000 people, residents of the South and North, were evacuated from their homes and stayed in hotels. We were privileged to be there for those whose ground was suddenly pulled out from under their feet and to assist them in mediating, making accessible, and realizing rights and grants in various areas. Later, we were also able to assist reserve soldiers, survivors of the Nova party, as well as communities in southern cities that were not evacuated.
In light of the gradual return home and the dispersal of large concentrations of evacuees, the mobile units are slowly completing their role. They are still operating in the field on a limited scale in a few locations where assistance is needed, and in parallel, we are handling the remaining open inquiries so that everything on our table will be closed completely.
Six Months of Service: The Impact of Mobile Rights Units in Israel’s Crisis
In almost half a year of intensive fieldwork, 127 rights realization coordinators were recruited and trained. They provided daily service in about 230 evacuation centers across the country and served as a complementary response to the “Rights Promoting City” program that operates in this field during routine and emergency times. During this period, we handled over 10,000 inquiries on various subjects! We reached hotels all over the country, from Eilat and the Dead Sea in the south to Tiberias and Nazareth in the north. We managed to reach many people and were there for them during complex days of uncertainty.
Last week, we held a closing and appreciation event for the staff of the Mobile Units system, together with our program partners. This is an opportunity to thank everyone for their dedicated, professional, and meaningful work that received much praise in the field. An important infrastructure was laid here for learning about emergency rights realization processes, and may we learn and derive important insights from it, but never need them again in the future.
