In February 2026, N12 — Israel's largest news outlet — published an in-depth magazine feature on the deepest shift underway in how the country handles rainfall: the transition from sealed cities that try to get rid of water as fast as possible to "sponge cities" that absorb the rain, hold it, and release it only when the network can take it. The trigger for the national change of mindset was tragic: urban flooding deaths that pushed regulators to act. The result is Amendment 8 to Israel's national planning code (TAMA 1), which for the first time makes developers legally responsible for managing runoff on their own plot — in the article's words, every new building in Israel now also functions as a small dam.
"The roof becomes an active reservoir"
The section that excites us most is what the feature calls "the advanced stage of the urban sponge": the neighborhood pilot in Akko, where 14 new buildings are equipped with SmartFlow's smart valve system — the deployment described in the piece, installed together with our partner Peleg Rainwater Solutions. The article walks through exactly what the system does: a sensor detects water pooling on the roof, the valves close automatically, and central software calculates how much water is held on each roof and times the valve openings so the municipal drainage network never sees too much pressure at once. The system defaults to open, has backup batteries, and everything is managed and logged in an app — how much rain landed on each roof, what the discharge rates were, and how much water was released.
As the feature puts it: where the roof used to be nothing more than a surface for getting water away from the building, in the sponge-city model the roof becomes an active reservoir. And the closing observation matters just as much for cities everywhere: this data — live, per-roof, per-storm — is exactly what municipalities today would need to install dedicated monitoring equipment to obtain. Here it simply happens online.
Why this matters beyond Israel
Israel's Amendment 8 is part of the same global regulatory wave as the EU's updated urban wastewater rules and municipal source-control requirements across Europe and the Gulf: responsibility for stormwater is moving to the plot and the building, and owners must prove performance, not just install equipment. National prime-time coverage of coordinated, actively-controlled roofs is a sign of where the market is heading — and the Akko neighborhood shows what it looks like in practice, on existing drainage outlets, with no added storage layer.
Read the full feature by Yogev Carmel on N12 (in Hebrew): "Sponge City: How They're Trying to Prevent the Next 'Elevator Disaster'" (26 Feb 2026)