Ziv Mazliach, chairperson of the "Homeward Forum" and a resident of Kfar Aza on the border with the Gaza Strip, joins the interview a few minutes after returning from a funeral. The forum he heads brings together the leaderships of fourteen communities severely hit by the Hamas assault on October 7, 2023, and in the past three years he has dedicated his time to their rehabilitation. But before we go into projects and plans, reality reminds us that nothing is over yet.
"It’s absurd that two months in advance you have ‘funeral’ written in your diary," he says. He refers to a young woman who was given temporary burial after October 7 and was reburied in the kibbutz. There is something almost grating in moving on from that topic to strategic plans and numbers, but in the Gaza envelope (that is, the area on the Israeli side within seven kilometers of the border with the Gaza Strip) these have not been separate stories for a long time.
Behind every budget for rehabilitating a house there’s a family that has to decide whether it feels capable of returning to it. Behind an education budget are children who hid for hours in a protected room. Behind investment in jobs lies the question whether a young family will choose to settle in the area. And behind the big growth plans currently being promoted in the Gaza envelope communities is a much more basic question: What has to happen in order for people to want to live here in ten and twenty years’ time?
Generating revenue
The rehabilitation of the Gaza envelope settlements has long since moved on from the emergency stage to the stage of construction, budgeting, and long-term planning, but it still takes place amid a delicate reality. The Homeward Forum is not a residents’ organization in the normal sense, and the communities that are members of it finance its activity themselves.
In its first year, the forum mainly dealt with housing evacuees in hotels and temporary accommodation, transport, compensation, rehabilitation calculations, and regulatory battles. One such battle concerned "desecrated homes", a term describing homes that were not physically destroyed but in which such terrible events took place that families cannot bring themselves to return to them. The question that arose was how to enable a family whose home was desecrated to receive another plot of land, when its original home still stood.
Another battle was over the grant for returning home. When the time came that it was possible to return to the "red" settlements (those in which houses had to be demolished) it turned out that the incentive previously given to other evacuees did not apply to them in the same format. After a fight, a NIS 75 million plan was formulated. "The first year was rehabilitation," says Eden Bizman, CEO of the forum, who was Naftali Bennett’s chief of staff when he was prime minister. "After that, we began to ask how to deal with growth."
The answer was to form a new economic corporation called "The Homeward Corporation" (Ta’agid Habaita). The idea was to take the business capabilities of the managements of the kibbutzim and to connect them to the four regional councils in the Gaza envelope in order to promote large projects. The corporation recently won a tender by the regional councils to run joint initiatives. The first on the agenda is the construction of a hotel, and the second is a complex for sheltered housing and care for the aged.
The economic idea behind these initiatives is that the councils provide the land, and obtain the permits and government and philanthropic aid, and thus become partners in the initiative alongside a private developer, and will be able to receive dividends, and not just the arnona (local property tax) that the projects will pay. From the point of view of the forum, this is meant as a transition from a support economy to an economy that itself generates revenue.
According to estimates in the government proposal of April 2024, the damage in the Gaza envelope settlements amounts to over NIS 5.3 billion, not including psychological treatment for hundreds of traumatized people. In the three worst hit settlements, Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Kfar Aza, it comes to about NIS 1 billion. "All in all, the state put a great deal of money into the south," says Mazliach. "You will hardly hear any complaints that there aren’t enough resources. The main battles are over the correct allocation of resources, and to ensure that they generate a significant impact."
The big question hovering over the rehabilitation effort in the Gaza envelope is what will happen on January 1, 2029, the date on which the mandate of the Tkuma Directorate, the government agency established to handle rehabilitation in the Gaza border area, will end. The forum fears that at that moment the government body that provides a complete layer of services built in the wake of the disaster will disappear. "An orphan child will not cease to be an orphan when the Tkuma Directorate stops operating," says Bizman.
"No sense of security"
Mazliach is chairperson of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, and has a consultancy that specializes in business development in rural areas. "If you don’t take care of yourself, all that’s left to you is to moan. And I’m a kibbutznik; I don’t like moaning very much."
In his childhood, the local economy mainly rested on agriculture, until in the 1970s the Kafrit plastics factory was set up. In the following decade came the financial crisis of the kibbutzim, but after that an economic structure was rebuilt that enabled the kibbutzim to grow. Today, Mazliach says, the fourteen settlements that are members of the forum together manage business activity worth over NIS 2 billion annually.
Three years on, do you feel that the sense of security has returned?
"It doesn’t exist. People returned in order to decide whether to remain, and there’s a strong population in this region that, if it should decide that it’s not going to stay, that’s a severe setback. All the same, the more you succeed in thinking strategically during a difficult period, the further you’ll get. On October 8, we had not yet buried a single person. We didn’t even know who was dead and who had been abducted, and even then I said ‘This is the time to start getting organized.’"
An economic plan generally rests on positive expectations.
"We didn’t wait to find out whether things would turn out well. We decided to be optimistic, and to ensure that it would happen. You can say that it’s foolish, naïve, or Zionistic. There’s a huge group of people here who get up in the morning so that things will be better in the envelope."
Not everyone wants to go home
The Homeward Forum is called that because from the start its aim was clear: to return to the devastated and evacuated settlements. But three years later, it’s also clear that "homeward" is not the same goal for everyone.
"There are people who can’t come back, and that’s the most legitimate thing in the world," says Mazliach. "What people went through here is something that no-one can understand. When you hold onto the door handle of the protected room for hours and decide between you and your partner who will survive and who will sacrifice themselves so that the other can flee with the children, no-one can tell you whether it’s alright or not alright.
"No-one is required to come back here by force. Whoever does come here, the community can wrap itself around them. Someone who goes to live elsewhere, it’s much harder for the community to enfold them. And that’s where the state needs to be, to take care of them."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on October 7, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.