Netivot Braces for Tens of Thousands at the Baba Sali Hillula

Israel Police and the Ministry of Religious Services approved their final plans for the annual hillula of Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, universally known as the Baba Sali, at a joint meeting held days before the event. A hillula is the commemoration of the anniversary of a revered rabbi’s death, marked with prayer, singing and feasting rather than mourning. Tens of thousands of worshippers were expected in the southern town of Netivot on 3 and 4 Shevat, corresponding to 21 and 22 January 2026.

The meeting brought together the senior levels of the ministry and the Israel Police Southern District, including District Commander Superintendent Haim Boblil and Negev Region Commander Superintendent Amir Klein, and covered the logistical and safety arrangements. The ministry’s director-general, Yehuda Avidan, opened the session and said the aim was to preserve the sanctity and dignity of the occasion, thanking the district commander and the Netivot station commander. Boblil said the district had been reinforced and drew on experience and lessons from previous years, adding that the instructions of officers in the field save lives and that the planning was unusually thorough because of the war. The hillula project manager, Yaakov Cohen, said the main effort had gone into preventing dangerous overcrowding, describing a clear directive to act in every way to prevent crowding that could endanger life and promising a noticeable change in the regulated areas. The ministry and the police asked the public to follow instructions and to travel by public transport, and said private vehicles would not be allowed into the hillula complex at all. During the days of the event, the release said, a special prayer would be held for the return of a police Yasam officer whom it named as Rani Guili, described as having fought on 7 October and as still held in the Gaza Strip.

Who the Baba Sali was

Israel Abuhatzeira was born in Rissani, Morocco, in 1889 into a celebrated family of Sephardi scholars and mystics, and died in 1984 at the age of 94. He immigrated to Israel in 1951 and settled in Netivot in the Negev around 1964, where he became revered as a kabbalist and healer, and he is buried there, according to accounts of his life. The tomb has become a popular pilgrimage site, and the anniversary gathering drew around 100,000 people in the years before the coronavirus pandemic, the Jerusalem Post reported in January 2022, when restrictions cut attendance to about a quarter of that.

Netivot, the town that has to absorb them

Netivot lies in Israel’s Southern District in the northern Negev, roughly 13 kilometres south-east of Sderot and 31 kilometres north-west of Beersheba. It was founded in 1956, was granted city status in 2000 and had about 56,000 residents as of 2024, according to the town’s profile. A crowd of tens of thousands is therefore a substantial fraction of the resident population arriving over two days, which is why transport rather than piety dominates the police instructions.

Why “preventing crowding” is the operative phrase

The insistence on regulated areas and crowd flow has a specific history behind it. On 30 April 2021, 45 men and boys were crushed to death and about 150 injured at the Lag BaOmer pilgrimage on Mount Meron, the deadliest civil disaster in Israel’s history, after pilgrims funnelled into a narrow passage. A state commission of inquiry later found senior political and police figures bore responsibility and that warnings about the site had been ignored for years, the Times of Israel reported in March 2024. The Netivot hillula is one of the largest annual pilgrimages in Israel, and its planning is now written in the language Meron forced on the system.

What Yasam is

The officer named in the prayer belongs to Yasam, the Israel Police unit that handles riot control, crowd management and rapid response, one of the force’s specialist national units alongside the Border Police and the Yamam counter-terrorism unit, according to a public overview of the force. The statement gave no further detail about his case beyond the description quoted above.

What the statement did not say

The release gave no attendance cap, no list of road closures and no figure for the number of officers deployed. It did not explain what the change in the regulated areas would consist of, nor whether any wartime restriction on gathering sizes applied. It also gave no information about parking or shuttle arrangements beyond the ban on private vehicles entering the complex.