A day after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised benefits to Jerusalem amounting to NIS 5.75 billion over the next five years, he headed to the North and continued spreading the largesse, promising NIS 95 million to refurbish the bomb shelters there. Olmert said that NIS 50 million of the sum would come from the government's budget, and the other NIS 40 million from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein's International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. "We will present a budget to upgrade and refurbish all the shelters in the North, from the Acre-Amiad line northward, within a number of months," Olmert told a meeting of local and regional council heads in Karmiel.
Adi Eldar, the mayor of Karmiel and the head of the Local Authorities Union, said this should have been started earlier. However, he acknowledged that government bureaucracy works slowly, and said he was optimistic that within a number of months, the majority of shelters in the North would be prepared for the possibility of absorbing people for extended stays.
During the tour, which began in the town of Shlomi and included a stopover in Arab el-Aramsha, Shlomi Mayor Gabi Na'aman took Olmert to a lookout post to see where Hizbullah outposts had been positioned before the war. "We are no longer under daily observation [from Hizbullah]," he said, adding that until the war, "every time we opened up our mouths, we knew that they were listening to us."