The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

We spent this summer in Kiryat Shmona, nine kilometers off the Lebanese border, on a pre-aliyah pilot trip. (We’ve found our town.) The apartment was three blocks from a bakery that announces itself from down the sidewalk. I had a butcher who knew me. There was kosher pizza (better than we expected). There were also military vehicles on the main street at most hours — flatbeds hauling tanks, jeeps with anti-drone netting strung over them like a misplaced soccer goal — and for a stretch in August, smoke coming over the hill from Lebanon thick enough to catch in your throat. Roughly a third of the city’s people were still not home.

The Tax Authority’s numbers say the town’s businesses are back, at roughly pre-war turnover. The Knesset’s Research and Information Center counted water meters instead, and reported this February that as of last September about 28 percent of the town’s commercial meters were not running. Tax data cannot see an osek patur, a dealer turning over under NIS 120,000 a year. Both numbers are honest. Only one of them can see the smallest businesses in town.

Israel built the largest civilian compensation program in its history after Oct. 7, and it largely worked. The state’s consolidated financial statements for 2025, published by the Accountant General, say so in a line: “מיום 7 באוקטובר ופרוץ המלחמה ועד ל-30 ביוני 2026 שולמו מקרן הפיצויים כ-35.1 מיליארד ₪” — from Oct. 7 and the outbreak of the war until June 30, 2026, about NIS 35.1 billion was paid out of the Compensation Fund.

Four-fifths of it went to lost business income rather than to broken buildings, across 356,635 separate claims.

Bituach Leumi runs the same way. On the eve of the war about 8,600 people were drawing benefits for hostile-action injuries. By June 2026 the number was about 29,000. Twenty thousand more people, each assessed by a medical committee.

Globes yesterday had the fund paying about NIS 42 billion and the earmark at a single 15 percent; the law sets two rates, and the Accountant General says 35.1.

All of that is money Israel owed. A man whose shop was shut by rocket fire files with the Tax Authority and the state pays, because a 1961 statute says it must. He did not have to know anything.

When you are new and you sit down with an advisor about an Israeli pension, the whole conversation is about paying in. How much, from which salary, at what split. I have had that conversation. Nobody has the other one.

Because there is a second entitlement, and it runs the other way. Anyone whose earning capacity was cut by injury or by PTSD may be owed a monthly disability pension by his own pension fund, out of money he has paid in for years. It arrives only if he asks.

Almost nobody has asked.

All summer we davened at a shul in Kiryat Shmona where a good number of the men were reservists — and most weeks we talked with people who had been hurt in the war. Over the course of several months no one mentioned a claim against their pension fund. While that is not evidence, it is part of the reason I went looking.

For a person injured on Oct. 7, 2023, that claim has to be with the fund by Oct. 7, 2026. Three weeks from now.

The rule is section 63(4) of the standard takanon, which every comprehensive pension fund in Israel runs on. Meitav’s current edition and Menora Mivtachim’s carry it word for word the same: The claim has to reach the managing company “בתוך שלוש שנים ממועד האירוע המזכה,” within three years of the date of the qualifying event.

There is an argument for more time. A 2024 amendment to Israel’s Limitation Law — amendment 8, Swords of Iron — inserted section 15א, excluding Oct. 7, 2023, to April 6, 2024, from the counting of a limitation period. Take those 183 days out and an Oct. 7 claim survives into early April 2027.

Do not rely on it. Section 15א reaches a limitation period fixed “בחיקוק אחר,” in another enactment, and a takanon is a contract. In January 2025 the Jerusalem regional labor court held that the amendment reaches the takanon anyway, over the fund’s objection that a statute cannot rewrite a contract. That is a regional court, the lowest tier, and the fund argued the other way.

And the excluded window ends on April 6, 2024. Anyone hurt after that date gets no extension at all and has three years from his own event. There is no national cutoff here, whatever you have read.

Polisa, the Israeli insurance trade paper, ran this nine days ago: “Oct. 7 is approaching — the limitation period is about to expire.” The people who do this for a living are writing to the earlier date. File by that date and you lose nothing. Wait for April and you are betting the claim on one regional judge.

This is not as much money as it sounds. Under pension circular 2015-3-1, National Insurance hostile-action benefits are a “קצבה ממקור אחר,” a pension from another source, and they are offset. The fund pays the higher of two calculations, capped. You do not collect two pensions. What is on the table is a monthly top-up out of money the member already put in — which, for someone who will not work again, is a great deal of money.

The funds know who these people are. They hold the membership rolls, the salary histories, and in most cases the month a member stopped being paid. Finding the ones wounded in this war is a database query.

What the rules ask of them is thinner. Circular 2015-3-1, section 3(a): a managing company shall notify a member that he must file for a pension from another source — “אם נודע לה,” if it becomes aware, that the member has a disability. And what it must then tell him is to go and claim from National Insurance. No line anywhere requires a fund to tell a member he may claim from the fund.

Nobody is going to fix this before Oct. 7, and the reason is on the calendar. The Knesset dissolved itself on July 17 and Israel votes on Oct. 27. Since then “there is an election on” has been the standing answer to almost everything. The Treasury is sitting on defense money the cabinet already approved, on the grounds that there is no need to transfer additional funds before the elections. The Attorney General has asked the High Court to let the next government decide who investigates Oct. 7 itself. A state in that condition does not stop to order a regulator to write letters, and the wounded are not a constituency anybody is courting in October.

Yom Kippur begins Sunday night. The Mishnah in Yoma is precise about what the day can and cannot do. Sins between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones for. Sins between a person and his fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone for “עַד שֶׁיְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ,” until he has appeased his fellow. An institution does not discharge what it owes a person by keeping its own books straight. It has to go and find him.

What is being asked for is small, and already paid for. The Tax Authority spent the war building a channel for donations from abroad and refunding the VAT on them, which tells you where a good deal of the relief money came from. What is left is a letter. The Capital Market Authority can order the funds to run the search and write to whoever comes back, and the funds can do it without being ordered.

And if you were hurt in this war, or someone you love was, call the pension fund this week. Not the National Insurance Institute. The pension fund. Ask about kitzvat nechut, a disability pension. The money is already yours. You still have to ask for it.

Uriel Zehavi is Executive Director of the Mitzpe Institute (mitzpe.org) and writes the daily Israel Brief (israelbrief.com). He is the author of four books, most recently Rooted in Judea: Lives and Law in the Heart of Israel, and is making aliyah to Kiryat Shmona with his husband, Modi.