Today, Sunday the 7th of April, the State of Israel will mark six months since the beginning of the "Swords of Iron" war.
As part of the war effort, the entire tourism industry was mobilized to respond to evacuees from the south and the north.
Now, half a year later and when most of the evacuees have already found permanent solutions, the hotel association is summarizing the data of the industry's activities and these are the findings.
At the height of the war, there were 119,000 evacuees in hotels across the country. About 47,000 hotel rooms were filled for the evacuees, out of 55,000 existing rooms. This is a record occupancy.
Distribution of evacuees:
Evacuees in the north: 25,000 in total (including: Tiberias, Haifa and the surrounding area, Zichron Ya’acov, Caesarea, Nazareth and more).
Evacuees in the south: 12,000.
Evacuees in Eilat: 27,500.
Evacuees in the center: 8,125.
Evacuees in Jerusalem: 21,250.
Evacuees in Tel Aviv: 25,000.
Sivan Detauker, CEO of the Israel Hotel Association: "The hotels in Israel have been a warm home for tens of thousands of evacuees for six months now. Hotel managers and teams invested a lot of input and created many services for the evacuees: setting up kindergartens and education systems, activity rooms, taking care of medical services and more, all in order to help them get through the difficult period.
"Without the immediate mobilization of the hotels from the first moment, even before an agreement was signed with the state, the hotels mobilized to give the evacuated population a solution.
In doing so, the hotels proved in practice that they are a strategic asset for the state and in order for us to meet future challenges, it is important that the state prioritizes aid to the hotels at this time."