After a contentious meeting, the cabinet decided overnight Thursday to extend the current COVID restrictions until 7 a.m. Sunday after Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit cancelled an earlier decision to extend it until midnight between Sunday and Monday, at the request of Blue and White leader Benny Gantz.

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Starting Sunday morning, the restriction on movement to 1,000 meters from one's home will be lifted. Sectors in which one service provider works on one client, such as hair and beauty salons, will be allowed to open, as will businesses that do not meet with the public.

Restaurants will now be allowed to offer takeout service.

No decision has yet been made about whether or not to open schools, and the cabinet is slated to vote on the matter by phone next week.

National parks and nature sites will reopen to the public, and bed and breakfast businesses will be allowed to accept reservations from nuclear families.

On Sunday, the cabinet is scheduled to meet to decide on a framework for when and how to allow businesses to reopen.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the agreement, saying, "It's good that the government accepted my and the Health Ministry's recommendations with only minor changes. The lockdown will continue until Sunday morning. I am asking the public to follow instructions carefully and get vaccinated. The vaccines work. The more people who are vaccinated, with an emphasis on those age 50 and over, the more we'll be able to gradually reopen the economy, with caution."

Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said, "I'm happy that common sense won out. Public health comes above any political argument. We can't play games with people's lives. I am calling on every single person – even when we start gradually opening things on Sunday – to follow the regulations."

At the end of the meeting Gantz said, "Blue and White never blocked a lockdown when it was needed. It acted and will act responsibly."

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With Israel's number of new confirmed COVID cases topping 1,000 for the first time in a month, Israel Hayom has reached out to public health experts to ask their opinions about the government's plans to lift more restrictions put in place as part of the second lockdown and send children in all grades back to school.

Many of the interviewees agreed that the government should stop opening more business and service sectors, and a few even recommended that this year's Hanukkah vacation be cancelled to avoid large gatherings in enclosed spaces.

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Professor Ronit Calderon-Margalit of the School of Public Health at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks that a distinction should be made between policies applied to schools and policies applied to businesses.

"For the sake of our children, we have to reopen the school system. Beyond that, the children study in designated placed and do not move from city to city, so we can map out 'red' and 'green' places and prepare accordingly. Only the teachers move around from town to town and from school to school, so we should be testing teachers a lot, but the schools themselves should be open, certainly in 'green' communities," Calderon-Margalit said.

"As far as business activity, we need to wait for the moment and not overburden the system, but see what effect the school reopenings have. We need to explain to the public that winter is here, big time, and that means flu and a greater burden on the health care system that needs to be taken into account. In addition, in winter people naturally congregate in warm places, crowd together, so reopening shopping malls right now would be a gamble," Calderon-Margalit added

The professor said that while she is not a fervent supporter of restrictions, COVID-19 is a dangerous illness and it would be a mistake to reopen all business activity at once, especially in the winter.

"If it were up to me, we would cancel the Hanukkah vacation so children won't flood into malls and shopping centers," she said, adding that if the decision were hers to make, she would not reopen gyms, restaurants, or any enclosed places where people might gather.

Professor Nadav Davidovitch, head of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team of experts that is advising the government on COVID policy, thinks that the public should be involved in the process of reopening business activity, which should be carried out cautiously and not all at once.

"If we open everything right now, it could bring us to a very bad place. Because of winter, people tend to gather in enclosed spaces and that could lead to a major outbreak, so we shouldn't go crazy. However, we need to state what is allowed so the public has things to do. We should go back to the stoplight plan, with places graded red, orange, and green," Davidovitch said.

"We need to allow communities to execute local operations to reduce the number of cases, which means giving more power to local authorities. I'm certain that a small community can handle an outbreak very well, and that might be possible in big cities, too. But for that, we need to enlist COVID personnel and inspectors with authorities given to them by various municipalities, which will provide work for some of the unemployed," he explained.

Davidovitch said that pilot programs to reopen shopping malls should be allowed to proceed, and the results evaluated. He also called for extensive outreach, as the public's cooperation was a necessary component to any plan.

"People need to download the [Health Ministry's] Magen 2 app and cooperate with us," he said.

Davidovitch also noted that there were still diseases other than COVID that required care. "It's winter now, and there are a lot of patients with chronic illnesses who need care, we need to go on and vaccinate against measles, which is kind of limping along, and only close cooperation and caution will allow the health care system to move ahead with every aspect of public health care.

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Two weeks ago, the Finance Committee held a fraught discussion about compensating owners of restaurants and hospitality businesses in Sderot and the western Negev. Some representatives of the business community there presented the committee with data that indicated a general collapse if they did not receive compensation for the business they lost during recent escalations of violence.

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"Everyone is fussing and pretending as if they're doing something, but actually nothing is happening, and you can see for yourself how empty my restaurant is," said Elraz Azran, 42, the owner of the Tovale café in Sderot.

"Last Friday, there were rocket barrages. I opened up on Saturday night. My workers came in, and for hours the café was empty except for one person. It's tremendous, ongoing financial damage. I'm not complaining about the residents. They're afraid to leave their homes, with good reason. And afraid for their kids. It's not only the Color Red alerts that scare them, it's also the Iron Dome interceptions," Azran said.

Yehuda Hazan, 56, who has owned Shawarma Hazan for over 20 years, discussed his current difficulties: "It's hard to run a restaurant in a situation like this. The people of Sderot like to go out to eat. But they're afraid, with good reason."

Yair Elbaz, 46, who owns a local pizzeria, is also suffering.

"I've seen my sales drop by over 50%. Even if the [Knesset] committee approves compensation, there will be more rockets tomorrow. We don't want money, we want a permanent solution, once and for all," he said.

The owner of an event venue claimed that he had lost hundreds of thousands of shekels because of cancellations.

One business owner who preferred to remain anonymous said, "There is this impression that we, the owners of restaurants and cafes and hospitality businesses, need the government to take pity on us. Not at all."

"We live in an area of war, we're attacked every day by rockets, and our living – especially our health – isn't in a good state. So it would be appropriate for the government to do one of two things: either find a solution to the problem, politically or militarily, or compensate all the business that are failing because of the rocket attacks," he said.

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