(Judy Maltz)
2:04 P.M. Assisted living home staff to be vaccinated
Ichilov Medical Center in Tel Aviv will inoculate the tenants and staff of assisted living facilities in Tel Aviv. This is a large campaign that will cover about 40 facilities in the city, covering about 8,000 people and a total of about 16,000 vaccines. Ichilov staff will deploy a large contingent of nursing staff to visit each facility at least four times during the campaign. (
Bar Peleg)
Controversy erupts over how coronavirus patients will vote in potential election
During the reading of the Law to Dissolve the Knesset, a disagreement erupted regarding how coronavirus patients would cast their vote in an upcoming election, stemming from fears of passing on the virus, scaring off healthy voters or the spreading of fake news.
Follow
Dec. 20, 2020
Ministries will be forced to cut their budgets in January by about a quarter of planned levels – a total of 10 billion shekels ($3.1 billion) – bringing many government activities to a standstill, an analysis by the Finance Ministry’s accountant general has found.
Behind the big spending cut, which will in particular hit state-supported nonprofit organizations and ultra-Orthodox educational institutions, is the political chaos that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Yisrael Katz have created by refusing to pass state budgets for this year or next, as part of their political war with Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan party.
Vaccination campaign kicks off - Inside Israel israelnationalnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from israelnationalnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Play audio
1XChange playback rate from 1 to 1
Mute audio
The bureau said housing starts jumped 19.4 percent to 11,695 units in the third quarter from the second, but that was mainly due to the end of the first coronavirus lockdown in the spring. Compared to third-quarter 2019, starts were down 14.6 percent.
Housing completions were down by an even sharper 13.2 percent in the 12 months through September, to 46,510 units. In the third quarter, they plunged 21 percent from the second to 9,886 units.
The report on the drop in housing starts comes less than a week after the bank of Israel took stops to make mortgages cheaper, a move that is expected to increase demand by making housing loans more affordable. A week ago, the Central Bureau of Statistics said that from August to October, 14,300 new homes were sold – an annual rate of 60,400 units.
Dec. 14, 2020
Amid continued signs that the residential real estate market is heating up, the Bank of Israel announced on Monday it was ending its ceiling on the portion of mortgage rates linked to the prime rate, a move seen as spurring even more demand by home buyers.
Under the new rules announced by the supervisor of banks, the Bank of Israel will only require lenders to set a third of a new home loan at a fixed rate of interest. The rest of the loan can be set at whatever interest rate option the borrower asks for.
Since the prime rate right now is so low, that will become the default option for borrowers and make taking out a home loan more attractive than before.