The authorities essentially vanished from the home front both before and during the Second Lebanon War, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss said in a scathing report published yesterday.

In an unusual move, the report named several current and former senior officials as being responsible for the severe failures on the home front. Normally, comptroller's reports do not name names.

"Israeli governments - at both the political and the bureaucratic levels - have not carried out their duties to safeguard the home front for many years, and failed to prepare a comprehensive operative assessment of how [the home front] would function in the event of an emergency," stated the 582-page report, which is longest ever published by the State Comptroller's Office, and possibly the harshest as well. "[This] has eroded the home front's ability to safeguard the civilian population during war."

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But even though many of these problems "have existed for many years," Lindenstrauss found that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former defense minister Amir Peretz, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz and commander of the IDF Home Front Command Yitzhak Gershon all exacerbated the situation through their flawed decision-making processes, assessments of the situation and operative handling of the home front during the war. These "captains of the ship of state" failed to prepare the home front for an emergency, he said, and once the war began, they invested most of their energy in the fighting, while neglecting the home front, which was "vulnerable to large-scale attack from the first days of the war."

Not until Day 19

After the war broke out, various professional bodies presented the government with situation assessments and estimates of the scope of the damage the war would cause. These assessments included a detailed description of the home front's preparedness for rocket and missile attacks. But the government did not discuss these assessments until July 30, the 19th day of the war, nor did it discuss significant issues such as the state of bomb shelters and the protection of homes against missiles.

Though the war's possible implications for the home front should have been clear from the start, both the government and the army failed to act, Lindenstrauss said. And even after it became clear to all that "the home front had turned into the front line," the government and state agencies for the most part responded in a "knee-jerk, partial and inappropriate" manner, "and often very late."

The government, Defense Ministry and IDF all had contingency plans that could have solved many of the problems, but these were not implemented during the early stages of the conflict, the report said.

Moreover, once it became clear that there was uncertainty over who was responsible for managing home front issues, the prime minister should have "devised an approach to assign responsibility and taken immediate steps to fix the problems in real time," Lindenstrauss wrote. "This was the real test of the country's leadership, and they failed."

Overall, the report said, most state institutions functioned poorly during the war. Many office-holders did not exercise their authority, or exercised it only in part or improperly. Neither cabinet ministers nor the defense establishment translated the prime minister's order of July 12, 2006 - "to prepare for a new reality on the home front" - into the necessary actions.

In contrast, Lindenstrauss praised the performances of certain individuals within government and public bodies who worked hard to aid residents of the North, as well as the great contribution made by donors, volunteers, private citizens and corporations. Yet these, he said, merely underscored the government's failures.

Lindenstrauss found severe problems with the police's functioning during the war, adding that these problems endangered the lives of both police sappers and ordinary citizens. Particularly dangerous to both sappers and civilians, he said, was the fact that the police had only outdated information on the types of weapons Hezbollah might use.

By law, responsibility for the home front rests with the IDF's Home Front Command (HFC). In an unusual move, however, the government authorized the police to assume this responsibility when the war began - without first checking whether or not the police were capable of carrying out these duties. Even Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who is responsible for the police, failed to examine this issue, Lindenstrauss noted.

"A decision with strategic implications for the police and the home front, which made the police the main authority responsible for the home front, was essentially made without any comprehensive discussion of the matter by all the responsible parties and without examining the systemic implications, including the dangers posed to the home front population," the report concluded.

Overall, the report said, the police "functioned well" and were highly motivated. But safeguarding the home front involved many complex tasks that the force had never before attempted, and the police also lacked the authority and resources to carry out these tasks. Thus the decision to give them this responsibility was a mistake, Lindenstrauss said.

Cooperation between the IDF and the police was also problematic, the report noted. For instance, military intelligence initially failed to give the police critical information regarding the rockets fired by Hezbollah. "Only several days after the beginning of the war, when the police had a critical need for highly classified information, did Military Intelligence set up an orderly channel through which specific information could be transferred to the police," it said.

The establishment of this channel was initiated by the police's intelligence department, not MI, the comptroller added.

The IDF also attempted to keep the police from using an alert system designed to warn against rocket strikes before the HFC's sirens went off. During the first days of the war, the police's northern district was given access to this system, but as the war continued, the HFC disconnected the police from the system. The police asked to be reconnected, saying the system could save the lives of both police officers and civilians, but this request was ignored.

Hazardous chemicals were neglected

The report criticized the HFC for failing to prepare adequately for a possible rocket strike on a site containing dangerous chemicals. The HFC also failed to coordinate its efforts on this issue with the Environment Ministry.

While the Environment Ministry's separate efforts to prepare for this possibility also had little success, the report blamed the failures mainly on the HFC, saying it failed both to inspect factories that handle dangerous chemicals and to enforce its orders on such factories during the war.

Moreover, though the war ended last August, the HFC has yet to finish safeguarding the 458 facilities that contain significant amounts of dangerous chemicals, it said.

According to the report, the HFC downplayed the potential dangers posed by the spread of dangerous chemicals in its briefing to the government, even though most chemical storage facilities were unprotected against missile attacks.

During the war, it continued, the HFC and the Environment Ministry gave conflicting assessments of the breadth of the threat and conflicting orders on the safety precautions that had to be taken. These contradictions damaged both bodies' credibility, confused the chemicals' owners and led some of them to threaten the state with lawsuits.

The HFC instructed several factories to minimize their use of dangerous chemicals during the war, but in response, the factories demanded compensation for the financial losses this would entail. For this reason, the report said, the HFC failed to enforce its instructions and basically allowed the factories to ignore its directions.

The HFC also failed to instruct chemical factories in close proximity to shopping malls, office buildings and public places to take extra precautions, which endangered countless lives, Lindenstrauss added. And it began to safeguard factories only nine days after the war began.

'A minimalist approach'

The comptroller also blasted several other aspects of the HFC's functioning during the war. First, he said, it took a "minimalist approach" toward assisting civilians in the North; thus even though it had the resources and manpower needed for the task, it failed to utilize them. This was "an extremely serious failure."

Nevertheless, the report added, ultimate responsibility for this failure lies with the prime minister and the government.

The decision not to issue a massive call-up of reservists for the HFC, which would have sent tens of thousands of soldiers to aid northern residents, was also a serious mistake, Lindenstrauss said. Instead, only three battalions of reservists, or about 3,000 people, were drafted into the HFC, and only after repeated orders by Peretz.

In addition, the HFC and the Northern District police utilized a new operational doctrine that had been decided upon before the war, but without receiving the necessary approvals and without the necessary legal and institutional changes being made. In accordance with this doctrine, HFC forces were placed under the police's authority during the war. Nevertheless, there was a lack of understanding and cooperation between the two bodies.

Evacuating civilians

The government never discussed evacuating civilians from the North, even after Hezbollah's attacks had prompted a mass southward migration. Lindenstrauss criticized this lapse, saying the government should have discussed this possibility. The defense minister in particular should have raised this issue, he added, yet Peretz refused to do so.

Given the large number of people who fled the North during the first week of the war, the comptroller continued, the government should have assisted the local authorities in evacuating residents in an orderly fashion. However, official plans to evacuate civilians were never put into effect.

But even if they had been, the report noted, "the plans for evacuating civilians were insufficient for the various [possible] scenarios." In particular, "several of the facilities intended for the absorption of evacuees were located in areas subject to IDF or Hezbollah bombardment, and several were not available at all."

In the end, from 200,000 to 300,000 people left the North on their own initiative, staying with family, friends or in places arranged by volunteer organizations.

When Lindenstrauss asked Olmert about the government's failure to evacuate civilians, the prime minister responded that he did not think the issue warranted a special cabinet discussion. Moreover, "the prime minister was of the opinion that evacuating hundreds of thousands of residents of the North would have a severely negative impact," the report said.

This conduct, Lindenstrauss concluded, was characteristic of many government offices and public institutions. "They did not take the initiative, nor did they use their authority to assist the population," the report said. "This conduct created a void that left the inhabitants of northern Israel vulnerable and defenseless."

The local authorities

Most local authorities in the North had no plans or infrastructure in place for emergency situations, the report said. The lack was particularly striking in Arab local authorities.

Bomb shelters in the North were unfit to be stayed in for extended periods of time, thus the general population had no real protection during missile attacks. Again, the problem was even worse in the Arab sector, but neither Jewish nor Arab local authorities properly maintained existing public shelters, for which they are responsible, and in some cases, they did not build enough shelters for their populations. Nor did the HFC supervise the shelters.

Pesach, the authority responsible for evacuating civilians, did not conduct situation assessments as often as necessary, the report found; thus in Kiryat Shmona and Shlomi, for instance, the issue of whether the local authorities were prepared to evacuate civilians in time of war was never mentioned in the three years proceeding last summer's war.

Moreover, it said, Pesach's proposals were not relevant to a situation where nearly half the country was within range of Hezbollah rockets.

Successive tax cuts over the years severely damaged the home front's preparedness for emergencies, the report added.

Needed: a plan

Overall, the report said, "the home front was not sufficiently prepared for war, despite the fact that its vulnerability has been known since at least 1991 [the Gulf War]."

Lindenstrauss listed three main problems. First, current law does not provide properly for home-front preparedness and its management during times of crisis. Second, neither the government nor individual agencies held comprehensive and orderly discussions of arrangements for emergency situations. Third, government departments, local authorities and other institutions, including the Home Front Command and the government's emergency management administration, did not carry out their tasks.

"The government must prepare a plan sufficient to handle the immediate evacuation of civilians located in high-threat areas and to ensure that absorption areas are capable of handling an emergency situation," Lindenstrauss concluded.

Such a plan must "ensure that the bodies responsible for transporting civilians in emergency situations work in coordination with state and national authorities," he said. Moreover, the government should "prioritize the different population sectors to be evacuated and prepare a computerized network for managing the evacuation and maintaining contact with the evacuees."

"With regard to evacuating civilians in high-risk areas, we assign great importance to cooperation among the civil authorities, private charitable organizations and volunteers," he continued. "Coordination among these bodies will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of future evacuations and help ensure the allocation of resources to areas in need of assistance."