Residents of Kiryat Shmona will now be eligible for private firearms licenses, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announces during a special faction meeting of his far-right Otzma Yehudit party in the northern city.
“Today I came with very important news for the city: we are going to turn it into a city entirely eligible for firearms,” Ben Gvir announces.
“After staff work in the ministry, we decided to designate all of Kiryat Shmona—excluding the industrial zone—but the entire city, as a firearms-eligible area. This will allow those who remain here to defend themselves — of course, alongside a large police presence,” Ben Gvir tells Mayor Avichai Stern.
Requests for gun permits surged following Hamas’s massive attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. In the wake of the massacre, the National Security Ministry also granted temporary authority to Ben Gvir’s personal staff appointees, Knesset employees, and others to approve gun license applications. Several were subsequently investigated by police on suspicion that the ministry inappropriately issued firearms permits.
In September, Ben Gvir said that since the beginning of his efforts to increase gun ownership, the government had issued around 230,000 new firearms licenses.
While Ben Gvir claims that putting more weapons on the streets has made Israel safer, women’s groups have decried the rising number of guns in Israeli homes, saying it poses a risk to victims of domestic violence.
Ben Gvir says that facilitating the return of the residents of the city who were displaced during the war against Hezbollah is important, declaring that “there is still much to do” while also touting 280 million shekels ($87.5 million) allocated to the city by Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf, a member of his party.
“I think this city must not only renew its former glory but grow even more, flourish and thrive. That’s why we’re here — to convey the message and do everything,” he says.
A day after the Hamas-led massacre in Israel’s south, the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah began firing barrages of rockets, missiles and drones at communities and military infrastructure in the north, leading to an unprecedented mass evacuation of some 60,000 people living close to the Lebanese border.
Virtually all the 24,000 residents of Kiryat Shmona, just over a mile from the border, were among those evacuated until a ceasefire was reached in the north in late November 2024.
Only 60 percent of Kiryat Shmona’s residents have returned to the city since the ceasefire with Hezbollah, and only about half of the local businesses have reopened.
