Some 40 environmental, health, and other civil society organizations appealed to the Interior Ministry and the National Planning Council on Sunday against moves to replace the Environmental Protection Ministry’s detailed probes into the likely environmental impacts of large infrastructure projects with generic, one-size-fits-all assessments ordered by the council head and completed by private consultants.

The proposal, according to an explanation on the planning council’s website in preparation for a discussion on Tuesday, will allow for “the shortening of planning procedures by providing certainty to the entrepreneur and the planning institution regarding the required framework.”

Relevant to infrastructure projects in fields such as transportation, waste management, energy, and mining and quarrying, it was included in the Economic Arrangements Bill that accompanied the 2026 state budget.

The planning council, Israel’s supreme planning body, explained, “The goal of this move is to streamline and expedite planning procedures, so that it will be possible to use a generic base of guidelines to which adjustments will be made, as required, according to the unique characteristics of a plan.”

The council said that the directors of the planning council and the ministry had met to coordinate guidelines and had agreed to bring any differences they could not resolve to debate.

It went on, “While the Planning Administration’s position is that the set of generic guidelines should include the relevant base guidelines,........

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