Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, under fire for his government's handling of the war in Lebanon, yesterday promised more than $2 billion (€1.556 billion) to rebuild northern Israeli towns hardest hit by Hizbullah rockets.
Mr Olmert's popularity has declined amid criticism of Israel's failure to crush Hizbullah in the fighting that ended on August 14th.
He is already struggling to hold together his coalition to pass an initial spending package for the 34-day war. He did not say where the new reconstruction funds would come from.
Adding to Mr Olmert's troubles, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's Shin Bet security agency, accused Israel of having abandoned its northern residents. "Governmental systems completely collapsed there," he said, according to news reports.
Mr Olmert promised an investigation. "The question is how to draw lessons from the achievements and from failures, from the responses we made and the failures we have had. Checks into this will be conducted," he said.
After surveying rocket damage in Nahariya, a battered town near the Lebanese border, the prime minister pledged to invest more funds to rebuild parts of northern Israel struck by 4,000 rockets.
He said he would convene a special cabinet session next week with an eye to approving more funds within two weeks and would make providing extra resources for the north a priority.
"I estimate that in the course of more than one budget year, sums that could reach 10 billion shekels [€1.79 billion] could be collected," Mr Olmert said.
"The essence of our mission is to push forward these events from despair to an opportunity. Billions will be invested . . . to turn the north into the paradise it can be," he added.
The rockets brought life in northern Israel, home to about a million people, to a standstill for a month. Thousands of homes and other property were badly damaged or destroyed.
Mr Olmert failed this week to win approval for a two billion shekel (€356 million) spending shift in the 2006 budget to help finance the war. Members of his biggest coalition partner, the Labour Party, rejected the measure because it meant cuts to social programmes.
But the prime minister hopes to offset some budget problems by up to $300 million (€233 million) in donations he expects from abroad. In recent weeks, Jewish organisations in the United States have been raising funds to help rebuild homes and damaged schools in the north.
Since the ceasefire took effect, there have been popular demonstrations against the government.
Opinion polls show public support for Mr Olmert has plummeted. A new survey on Channel 2 television showed support for his party, Kadima, had been cut in half. It said Kadima would win 14 seats compared with 29 in the March election. Labour lost a similar amount of backing from 19 to nine seats, while two rightist parties, including Likud, headed by former finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had doubled from 12 to 24 seats.