Israel Approves 30,551 Homes, Most of Them in One Negev Town

Israel's Ministerial Committee for Interior Affairs approved a package of measures on 21 October 2025 to push forward tens of thousands of new homes and a set of urban renewal schemes, according to the announcement. In total, 30,551 additional housing units were cleared for accelerated development across the country.

The units sit in four complexes. In Kiryat Malachi, a town roughly 50 kilometres south-east of Tel Aviv, the committee declared the Hala District a preferred housing complex of 6,080 homes alongside 450,000 square metres of employment and commercial space. In Rehovot, about 20 kilometres south-east of Tel Aviv, the TAMAL Center announcement was amended to widen the plan area and add 2,035 homes as part of a renewal of the city centre. The two largest are both in Netivot, about 20 kilometres north-west of Be'er Sheva and close to the Gaza Strip: a large evacuation-and-construction plan of 13,000 homes in the old city, and an amendment to the TML/2027 plan expanding it by a further 750 dunams (some 75 hectares) for 9,436 more homes, in cooperation with the Israel Land Authority. Netivot and Kiryat Malachi, the announcement noted, are both traditionally lower-income, developing areas.

What a “preferred housing complex” actually is

The phrase is a legal designation, not a marketing one. It routes a plan to a national fast-track planning body set up in 2014 under a temporary order (known by its Hebrew acronym Vatmal, the Committee for Preferred Housing Sites), which can approve large schemes in areas the government designates while bypassing the layers of district and local planning that would normally apply. By 2021, the Times of Israel reported, it had cleared more than 200,000 homes, against roughly 700,000 approved by the ordinary committees over the same decade. Environmental groups have argued that speed comes at the cost of open and agricultural land, and mayors have complained that the homes arrive faster than the roads, sewers, schools and public transport meant to serve them.

That argument attached itself to this package almost immediately. Ynet reported that opponents of the Kiryat Malachi scheme said it took in open farmland and that a legal team had begun work on a petition to the High Court of Justice, and that the neighbouring Be'er Tuvia regional council had put forward an alternative layout it said would sharply cut the agricultural land consumed.

Evacuation and construction, in plain English

The 13,000-home Netivot plan uses the mechanism Israelis call pinui-binui, evacuation-and-construction: old low-rise blocks are demolished and rebuilt at much higher density, with existing residents moved out during the works and given a new, larger flat in the finished development. It is the main tool Israel now uses to add homes inside built-up areas rather than on open ground, and it is doing a great deal of the work: Ynetnews reported that half of all housing units approved in Israel in 2025 came through urban renewal.

Why so much of it lands in the south

The geography of the package is not an accident. Ynetnews reported that Israel approved 223,164 housing units in 2025, against a government target of 125,000, and that the Southern District took the largest share of any district at 27,478 units, including 17,500 in the western Negev towns of Sderot, Netivot and Ofakim, the communities closest to the Gaza border.

Development towns and the gap that persists

Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics sorts local authorities into ten socio-economic clusters, one being the lowest. Netivot, Kiryat Malachi and Ofakim were all placed in cluster three, the Times of Israel reported in 2019, in a piece that also recorded a roughly 20 per cent gap in average wages between the development towns and the country as a whole, persisting over two decades. In the ranking reported in July 2024 by Globes, Kiryat Malachi slipped from the fourth cluster to the third.

Approvals are not apartments

The gap between a plan approved and a family moving in is where Israeli housing policy tends to fail. Ynetnews reported that even with approvals running at 180 per cent of the annual target in 2025, professionals in the sector identified execution rather than planning as the bottleneck, with construction timetables continuing to stretch. The demand side does not wait: on figures reported by the Times of Israel in 2019, the national plan called for about 65,000 homes a year, on top of a shortfall then put at around 150,000 flats. Prices have since softened rather than fallen away: a Times of Israel housing snapshot published in May 2026 put the average flat at about NIS 2.33 million in the first quarter of 2026, down 1.2 per cent year on year, with a record stock of unsold new-builds.

What the announcement did not say

The committee's statement set out unit counts and plan areas but no timetable, no budget and no construction start dates. It did not say how many of the 30,551 homes would be sold at subsidised prices or reserved for existing residents of the neighbourhoods being cleared, nor what infrastructure (schools, clinics, roads, rail) would accompany them. It also gave no indication of where residents of the Netivot old city would live during the demolition and rebuilding.