An Israeli ministerial committee will soon consider the ramifications of evacuating hundreds of thousands of residents to safe ground in case of a wartime mass missile barrage, or cataclysmic natural disaster.

The Ministerial Committee on Home Front Affairs will next week weigh an existing contingency plan, which includes dispersing the populations of whole cities that lay within the bulls' eye of Iranian, Hezbollah or Hamas long-range rockets to spread out, sparsely inhabited areas, according to the Ynet news site.

All three have vowed to launch rockets at Israeli urban areas in case of war, specifically mentioning Tel Aviv and the port city of Haifa.

As well, Israeli Army Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh on Sunday warned that the growing civil war in Syria could prompt President Bashar al-Assad to attack Israel as a diversionary pretext.

Assad would "treat us the same way he treats his own people," Naveh said at a ceremony for fallen soldiers held in Jerusalem, hinting that the Syrian leader might opt to use his stores of chemical and biological weapons against the Jewish state.

Military officials here are also concerned that the bombs and precise long-range rockets that they would be mounted on could fall into the hands of rebel forces, or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

They have said in recent weeks that they are monitoring that prospect, and have said they will do whatever is necessary to keep the deadly gas and biological agent munitions out of the hands of the Lebanon-based Shiite group.

Meanwhile, on the home front, "there are some 1.7 million residents living in Israel who don't have a bomb shelter or a bunker," Knesset parliament member Zeev Bielski (Kadima) said in March.

"We're talking about some 400,000 homes and apartments, most of which were built in the 1950s," he said. "In case a war breaks out, these residents will be told: 'Sit under a doorpost,'" according to Bielski, who chairs the Foreign Affairs and Defense Subcommittee for the Examination of Home Front Readiness.

After Hezbollah fired some 4,000 Scud and Kassam rockets into northern Israel in the 2006 conflict, authorities have renovated more than 500 bomb shelters. Many of the poorly-maintained shelters provided cover for civilians during the month-long fighting. Some one million others, however, headed south out of the rockets' range due to lack of space of emergency supplies.

However, according to Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav, "Since 2006 we have been intensively busy making arrangements ... preparing for difficult events."

A defense official told Ynet that "It'll cost billions to decrease these gaps, and this money will come out of the education, welfare or (social reform) budgets -- but it's non-existent. Even if it did exist, its contribution would be mostly psychological," he added.

While "Israel has made a great effort to coordinate between the different emergency forces," a Home Front Command official told Ynet, "this urgency was not realized in the budgets," and urged authorities to "change the Israeli way of thinking regarding this issue."

Among the options for transferring the urban populations to safety are busing southern residents to the Red Sea port city of Eilat, and the nearby Arava Valley area bordering Jordan; and transferring northern communities to Ariel, east of greater Tel Aviv, and other West Bank settlements.

Home Front Protection Minister Matan Vilnai told Ynet that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on the program, which has an estimated budget running into hundreds of millions of shekels.

"I have spoken to council heads in the Eilat district and they appreciate the importance of hosting residents of central and northern Israel at times of emergency," Vilnai told Ynet.

Vilnai, who is due to soon take up a new post as envoy to China, said that "One must keep in mind that countries will agree to help us and send portable housing units at times of massive natural disasters such as earthquakes or fires but I doubt this will be the case during a war."

During a national crisis, residents in central and northern area would be temporarily housed in schools, hotels and private bed and breakfast lodgings, and caravans and tents, according to a Housing Ministry plan.

While away from home, the Finance Ministry would provide each resident weekly with 150 NIS (about 39 U.S. dollars), and each children about 100 shekels (26 dollars) toward school supplies, the report said.