Israel needs to invest hundreds of millions of shekels to ensure all the communities across Judea and Samaria are properly protected in the event of war, a senior military official said Wednesday.
Col. Golan Wach, outgoing head of the IDF Homefront Command's Physical Protection Division, said that while the government invests considerable resources in the daily protection of Judea and Samaria communities, wartime fortification is a different matter.
Wach, whose office is responsible for the fortification of hundreds of thousands of homes in the event of earthquakes and armed conflicts, as well as for the fortification of homes in the Gaza-vicinity communities, said that "over 70% of Israelis have proper wartime protection. The threats to Israel may be growing, but we are in a good place. With changing building codes and urban rejuvination projects, the older types of [unprotected] buildings are slowly disappearing."
The Homefront Command has been placing special emphases on the fortification of homes and businesses in the south, near the Israel-Gaza Strip border, and in the north, near the borders with Lebanon and Syria, but Wach does not hide the fact that Israel still has a long way to go when it comes to fortifying Judea and Samaria communities.
"The budgetary vector has been pretty constant over the past few years, and there has been an increase of tens of millions of shekels, allowing us to give some communities new options," he said, adding that in order to properly bring the fortification of all communities in the area up to code, the budget would have to increase exponentially.
"The current [work] plan can prioritize a small number of communities. It would take hundreds of millions of shekels to get to a situation where all settlements receive the same level of fortification.
"If such a plan were to go through it would be a real boon for Judea and Samaria. As things stand, we can take comfort in the fact that every year three settlements receive the proper fortification," he said.
