Last week, during the dismissal of Israeli students from schools, Hezbollah violated the “ceasefire” and launched barrages of rockets from Lebanon toward Israeli yishuvim on the northern border.

Security officials in the local councils, responsible for managing such incidents in real time, found themselves operating in a fog, with no information on the scope or direction of the rocket fire and unable to determine whether explosions were interceptions or direct impacts in open areas.

The reason for this security fog was that the Home Front Command had recently disabled local municipalities’ access to the Shu’al civilian emergency management system, used to track expected rocket impact zones. As a result, reserve liaison officers and local authorities were left operating under fire without this critical life-saving tool, Ynet reported.

The National Home Front Command and Control system (known by its Hebrew acronym “Shu’al”) is capable of predicting and marking expected impact locations, enabling targeted early warnings and the rapid deployment of emergency responders to precise locations after impacts.

According to the report, access to the system was blocked due to serious concerns of information from the system leaking to Iranian agents surveilling impact locations and Israeli alert systems in an effort to improve the accuracy of future strikes.

Heads of municipalities and security officials in the Galil are furious, saying they have been stripped of a basic operational tool to protect residents while under fire.

Asaf Langleben, head of the Upper Galilee Regional Council, sent a letter to Home Front Command chief Maj. Gen. Shai Klapper, writing: “It’s absurd that Hezbollah knows where it is firing. At the very least, we should also know and be able to manage the incidents and responses we are required to provide.”

Local leaders in Kiryat Shmona, the most heavily targeted city in northern Israel, and in regional councils along the border, expressed similar frustration over the army’s unilateral decision, which was made without prior coordination.

“Shual is a critical, life-saving tool,” Kiryat Shmona Mayor Avichai Stern said. “Leaving us without it means abandoning even more lives in an area where most residents already lack protection. Now we are also being stripped of the ability to rescue the residents under fire.”

“This is a life-saving tool,” a security officer in one northern border community said in a meeting last week. “No one speaks with us, explains anything, or thinks they owe us answers. They simply cut us off.”

“Instead of assigning an information-security officer from Home Front Command to deal with the issue and stop the leak, they just blocked access,” he said. “Maybe it’s true that the enemy is obtaining information it shouldn’t have. So disconnect everyone temporarily, change passwords, restore the system within a few days, and establish confidentiality procedures. But in the army, instead of solving the leak problem, they chose the easiest option and shut it down for everyone. They are irresponsibly punishing us.”

In response, the IDF spokesperson said: “The access rights and operational data available through the civilian Sh’al system are reviewed and updated from time to time by authorized IDF officials, in accordance with operational needs and information‑security considerations.”

“The Shu’al system contains sensitive information, and during the war, cases were identified that required procedural adjustments and tighter access controls in order to prevent harm to information security.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)