By Pesach Benson • February 24, 2026
Jerusalem, 24 February, 2026 (TPS-IL) — The children arrived at the hotels with nothing. No school bags, no textbooks, no routine. Some had watched their homes burn. Others had spent hours hiding in safe rooms while their neighbours were killed. And then, for weeks, they had nothing to do.
When Israel mobilized to evacuate approximately 246,000 residents from its northern and southern border communities following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, it set in motion a displacement that would last nearly two full academic years. Some 48,000 students — around 2 percent of all schoolchildren in Israel — were uprooted from their classrooms, their teachers, and their friends, and scattered across 51 absorbing municipalities nationwide.
A sweeping audit by Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, released on Tuesday, documented what happened to those children — and to their families — describing a systemic failure at the highest levels of government. The State Comptroller regularly reviews Israel’s preparedness and the effectiveness of government policies. Englman also released reports highlighting failures in the evacuation of frontline communities and the chaos of wartime displacement.
Thousands of Displaced Students Unaccounted For
For the first three weeks after evacuations began, the Ministry of Education was largely absent. Hotels, local councils, and volunteers improvised makeshift classrooms in conference halls and hotel lobbies — spaces without walls, without divisions, without quiet. Groups of 60 to 70 children of mixed ages sat together in ballrooms while harried staff attempted to teach. When formal arrangements were eventually established, they amounted to three or four hours of lessons per day, four or five days a week — for all ages, including teenagers sitting national matriculation exams.
“The education system was not prepared to cope with the challenge involved in evacuating tens of thousands of students,” Englman said. “Seven months after the massacre, the Ministry of Education had no information on 10,000 students.”
The audit’s numbers are stark. By January 2024 — more than three months into the war — the Ministry of Education could not confirm whether approximately 39 percent of displaced students were enrolled in any educational framework at all. Around 2,400 students had no known location. As late as April and May 2024, reliable school placement data was missing for roughly a quarter of all evacuated children from Israel’s north.
Transport, which should have been the basic mechanism for getting children to whatever schools existed, was only formally funded by the ministry approximately one month after evacuations began. Before that, whether a child got to school depended entirely on whether their host municipality chose to pay. Reimbursements to those that did were still outstanding at the time of the audit.
Students from Kibbutz Nirim near the Gaza border board a bus on the first day of school on Sept. 1, 2025. Photo by Adele Raemer/TPS-IL
Displaced teachers faced their own version of the same chaos. Many had been called up for military reserve duty. Others were themselves evacuees, living in hotels in cities where their students were staying. According to the audit, “the shortage of teachers, which was already evident before the emergency crisis, worsened as a result.”
Focus groups conducted by the Comptroller’s office captured the human texture of the failure. “Only after about two months did the education system start working, in a limping way,” one evacuee told researchers. “In the first period, it was not possible to provide answers because of many reasons. There were no teams, there were no budgets, it was not clear from the Ministry of Education how things work. A lot of uncertainty — who is responsible.”
At-Risk Teens Fall Through the Cracks
The audit noted that the Ministry of Welfare also had no emergency plan commensurate with the scale of displacement, which had grave consequences for at-risk youth, special needs children, the elderly, domestic abuse survivors, and others. At-risk teenagers fared particularly badly. Between 20 and 30 percent of at-risk youth from Sderot who were evacuated to the city of Eilat received no organised or supervised support. The audit describes the overall response to displaced adolescents as unsystematic, and warns of a significant risk that many young people experiencing trauma, instability, and loss of community were pushed toward the margins.
“In the difficult situation that has developed among young people, point solutions are not enough,” Englman said. “The Ministries of Education and Welfare must address the need to define the roles of evacuating and absorbing authorities in the treatment of displaced young people — in a way that will help at-risk youth and prevent additional young people from joining that circle.”
The Comptroller’s report closed with a series of demands directed at the ministries that failed. The audit called on the Ministry of Education to define — before any future emergency — the precise responsibilities of both evacuating and absorbing authorities, to build school transport funding into emergency procedures from the first day, and to develop a real-time data system capable of tracking every displaced student.
The audit also called on officials to map dropout risk among the students who have already returned home, and to develop targeted intervention plans for those who stopped attending during the evacuation period. Regarding at-risk youth, Englman called for an immediate, comprehensive rehabilitation plan. Because the Ministry of Education has no unified tracking system and no consistent attendance monitoring, there is no way of knowing how many displaced students have dropped out entirely.
“The absence of regular attendance during the evacuation period may harm the continuation of their studies in educational frameworks, even after their return home,” the audit warned.