The economic fallout from another war with Iran has hit small businesses across Israel with particular force, company owners and industry consultants told The Jerusalem Post, describing steep revenue losses, mounting uncertainty, and limited government support.

The Finance Ministry acknowledged on Wednesday that the new round of conflict could cost the country more than NIS 9 billion a week. With gatherings and nonessential work from the office prohibited, and airlines doing their best to avoid the region, multiple industries have been deeply affected.

After the Post contacted Yair Amit of Zoo Consulting, a marketing, business, and financial advisory firm that assists olim in opening and operating businesses, business owners quickly contacted the Post with accounts of the war’s immediate effect. Many described canceled appointments, disrupted imports, closed facilities, and growing fears about how long they could withstand the disruption.

“The current economic uncertainty is hitting businesses hard, but not equally. After working with clients across many industries, one thing is clear: how badly a business is affected comes down to two things: How essential their service is, and how willing people are to leave their homes,” Amit explained, adding that the hospitality and wellness industries were the hardest hit.

Beyond people being reluctant to step too far away from their shelters, the realities of life in war, like reserve duty and a lack of work, have meant that many families need to cut back on their spending. “Eating out is a treat, not a necessity. When money gets tight, it’s the first thing families cut,” he explained.

Amit continued to note that owners of companies with physical premises can be hit by Iranian strikes, and businesses can be shut down entirely with little warning and little help from the government. Businesses received a fraction in financial compensation for what they lost during the 12 Day War with Iran in June, and the money came much later than would have been ideal, he explained.

Elad Tabakov, the owner of the board games house Drix Haifa, recounted how he opened his company only months before October 7 after noticing a gap in the Israeli market. He and his wife invested all their savings into building the company, and saw immediate interest from the local community.

After Hamas’s October 7 invasion, Drix Haifa was forced to intermittently close for months at a time, as airstrikes against the northern city became too intense to allow recreational activities to continue, especially given that the 400-year-old building housing the company isn’t located near a shelter.

On this past Saturday alone, Drix lost an estimated NIS 15,000 after selling out tickets for a gaming event, with NIS 5,500 lost in ticket sales alone. Separate from the missed income opportunity, Tabakov shared that the company was still responsible for the same rent, arnona, and bill payments, so just being closed was costing him between NIS 100,000 and NIS 150,000 every month.

“We started on hard mode. So every time something like this happens, I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, if we survive this, we can last.’ So for now, we’re not making a lot of money for myself. I’m definitely not getting rich from it... I’m basically surviving. We all are. And then, hopefully, when the times are relaxed, if it ever happens in this country, we can actually profit from it and maybe open another place like this,” Tabakov said.

Drix also employs one full-time and eight part-time staff members, some of whom rely on the company as their sole source of income. Without the business opening, the hourly employees lose out.

Local suppliers have also greatly suffered, Tabakov explained. Each month, the company spends NIS 12,000 on beer and NIS 5,000 on purchases from a local cheese store – money that isn’t circulating when the company shuts.

During the previous war with Iran, a rocket fell less than a kilometer from the business. Asked what would happen in a worst-case scenario, if a missile landed on his company, Tabakov said they would lose the NIS 50,000 to NIS 60,000 they had spent on board games alone, separate from the furniture they invested in and the time they spent making everything fit their image.

“Hopefully, we can get back on track, but we don’t know how long it will last.... Our actual worst-case scenario is this [war] lasting until Passover.... Obviously, as a country, this also has an impact, but as a business, it’s hard. I hope we can survive this,” he shared.

For Tehila Mocton's company, Fiber Gourmet, the latest conflict has brought an entirely different set of issues. Mocton’s family company manufactures in the US and Italy, and the war has, naturally, caused issues with shipping to Israel by sea and air, though little of the company’s income relies on Israeli sales.

Mocton became CEO of her family’s company in 2017 and made aliyah with her husband and children shortly before October 7. Since the attacks, she has done her best to avoid disclosing that she is from Israel, as she began hearing comments from clients that left her uncomfortable, but the sirens in meetings and the general disruptions associated with the war have made that harder. 

“After October 7, I had conversations with people with whom we were going to work, and they flat out said things like, ‘Well, I’ll work with you despite your country committing a genocide,’ and things like that. They would just say that to my face in meetings, which obviously made it feel very hostile, and I didn’t want to work with them,” she recounted.

“And I’ve had customers who found out I was in Israel – because I wasn’t trying to hide it, because I didn’t feel like I needed to – and they said that they would not buy my products because they would not support a company where the CEO lived in Israel.”

The war has also made the logistics of working harder, she explained. Having her children home, with schools closed, being woken in the night and early hours by sirens, and the psychological effect of knowing she lives so close to the site where nine people were killed by an Iranian missile have affected her work.

For Daniel Senerman, who works as an independent physiotherapist in his company Nomadfit, the war’s psychological effect cannot be escaped. Each day, Senerman said that 20%-30% of his clients were canceling their sessions over the stress caused by the war. With the majority of his clients having some kind of disability or injury preventing them from moving to a shelter quickly, not knowing when the siren will blare has been a cause of significant stress, preventing them from focusing on physio, despite the effect on their health.

Senerman made aliyah from Chile after spending years studying physiotherapy, hoping to bring his skill set to help people in Israel.

He drives to his clients’ homes to make the journey to recovery or limb maintenance more accessible to them. Now, though, it has become “much harder” for him to travel, as he relies on routes he is familiar with and where there are public shelters. Multiple times, Senerman shared, he had to stop on the way to a client’s house due to Iranian attacks, finding cover under bridges.

“The main problem is the driving, because you can get an alarm in the middle of the journey,” he explained. “So, then you put your life at risk – that is the most dangerous thing.”

Like Senerman, Eli Altar works for himself but in a very different field: entertainment. The mentalist explained that, as a reservist, returning to conflict means being taken away from his work.

“I am independent. There’s only me. I’m a one-man show. So when I’m in the army, there is no job, and it’s really a problem for us,” he explained.

Altar started his journey practicing illusions in the army, eventually turning it into his full-time job, performing at bar mitzvahs and corporate events.

While the country compensates Altar for his time, he said it is a fraction of what he would be earning on stage. “I’m not under the water [financially], but I’m not swimming well,” he explained.

Nina Anders, an architect and accessibility consultant who runs the company Coco Architecture, spent years qualifying to help design accessible homes in Israel, something she had done in the United Kingdom for nearly a decade. Unlike in the cases of the others, the war hasn’t led to a lack of clients, but the tragic opposite,” she explained.

More than two years of war have left thousands of soldiers with new disabilities that their homes are not designed to accommodate, and a new ground operation in Lebanon means more young people will return home in very different circumstances than when they left, she said. Anders recounted that in December of 2024, she was told that there were 15,000 wounded soldiers waiting for accessibility adjustments in their homes, and this figure doesn’t factor in the thousands more impaired by health problems, age, accident, or birth defect.

Up until October 7, about 75,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and 12,000 in the Gaza Strip held permits to work, with another 15,000 illegally employed, according to Globes. After the Palestinian workers were barred from Israel, the country’s construction industry faltered significantly, and projects slowed, with nearly a third of the industry’s workforce now gone. While Israel has sought to replace the manpower with foreign workers, Anders said, “There’s a lapse between what needs to be done and the people who can actually take on [the projects].”

Separate from the shortage of qualified construction workers, the war has disrupted the supply of critical materials needed to design accessible homes.

“If I have a soldier who’s been injured and wants to come back home after rehabilitation, I can have everything ready for them, but if I can’t get materials delivered on site to fit out the accessible bathroom or the kitchen counter, all those kinds of things that need to be reinstalled to accommodate someone who is facing a new sort of reality as a disabled person – that’s causing a problem,” she shared, adding that the first reintroduction to home can be critical for how soldiers adjust to their new lives as disabled people.

Standard materials available are also often not appropriate for the needs of disabled people, she explained. The average opening of a protected room door is 70 cm, but wheelchairs are often wider than this, she exemplified.

The current balance of supply and demand has meant that both materials and construction workers are more expensive, making it harder for Anders, who does a number of pro bono projects for members of the IDF who were disabled during their military service.

“Over the last couple of years, the whole dealing with accessibility has changed from clients who suffer with Parkinson’s or people just later in life, and they just want to have a more comfortable home because they’re in their 70s or 80s, to soldiers who are 18-19 years old,” she shared. “They have lost an arm or lost a leg, or it’s just a whole different level of working with accessibility and disabilities. And I can just see from the number of inquiries and the types of inquiries that these numbers are scary, and I have to hope it will change our society’s understanding of disability-accessibility, because it’s [the construction work is] for young people who got a whole life ahead of them, and I’m worried that this war now will be a little bit like a bottleneck effect on how quickly we can get those boys and girls back to some kind of normality.”