Following a severe fire that ravaged 26 homes and businesses in Gilad Farm yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich held a situation assessment at the burnt down town, alongside IDF Judea and Samaria Division Commander Col. Kobi Heller, Samaria District Police Commander Superintendent Moshe Pinchi, the fire brigade commander, Samaria Governor Yossi Dagan, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s subcommittee on Judea and Samaria, and town chairman Moshe Hakmon.
The finance minister directed senior property tax officials to send assessors immediately to document the damage for compensation purposes, alongside providing immediate assistance to 110 residents’ families who lost their houses and examining permanent solutions immediately. Samaria Governor Dagan thanked the minister for his assistance to residents, and they are currently holding conversations with residents to help those affected by the severe fire.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “First and foremost, we want to send a very big hug to the residents of Gilad Farm who dealt with enormous courage with the severe fire on Shabbat and with quite a bit of damage—homes and businesses that burned down.” The minister announced: “At the government and local authority level, we are acting immediately to accompany the residents and embrace them. We have an unequivocal commitment to ensure that Gilad Farm as a town grows, develops, and improves. We are currently studying the options and will accompany the residents along the way. We are building the town as the security buffer of the State of Israel.”
Samaria Governor Dagan said: “I thank you for coming here to strengthen the residents. There are hundreds of people here who worked throughout the entire afternoon. This is a major incident, a very difficult incident. From our perspective, how we see it, this is certainly the result of human action. We are reinforcing this as a reasonable suspicion, very much so, that this is arson.”
Dagan clarified that there are about thirty structures that were damaged, almost all of them belonging to families, that burned completely, as well as businesses that burned completely, and infrastructure that was almost completely destroyed. “We expect the State of Israel to act with full force, to study how we rehabilitate the infrastructure of this town.”