The state commission of inquiry into the Meron disaster resumed hearing testimony on Thursday, during which head safety engineer Amer Khalaila admitted that he never once evaluated the safety of Gesher Dov, the narrow passageway where the terrible disaster occurred.
“You never actually evaluated the gesher?” former Supreme Court President Miriam Naor, the head of the commission, asked him. “Did you check it to ensure it met safety standards?”
“Since it was already there for several years, I didn’t check if it met safety standards,” Khalaila responded.
“So in your view, if you received something from the past, then it’s okay?” Naor asked.
Khalaila, who failed to evaluate the safety of Gesher Dov even once in his seven years in his position, even suggested that maybe the disaster was the fault of the people visiting Meron. Naor responded by scolding him to remove that factor completely off the table.
Kahlaila also testified that the number of people he estimated could safely enter Har Meron was about a third of the number of the people present when the disaster occurred. However, it became clear during his testimony that although he was present at Meron on Lag B’Omer and saw that the number of people arriving at the mountain was far more than he had deemed safe, he failed to issued a warning about it.
Commission member Maj.-Gen. (res.) Shlomo Yanai asked him: “You signed a safety document and said that you didn’t know that there would be over 5,000 people at each hadlaka. You said that that surprised you. You suddenly see that that there are 70,000 people on the mountain. You didn’t think of issuing a warning?”
Khalaila responded: “I told the officer that the place is very crowded.”
Khalaila also mentioned the fact that Meron was extremely crowded due to the fact that Lag B’Omer was on a Friday, which meant that there was a shorter time period for people to visit and they all came at once. Additionally, he said: “The difference between previous years to this year was that Toldos Aharon always lit at the last moment and whoever remained were only the chassidim themselves. This year, they were the second hadkaka and therefore there were many people there.”
The former head of the police department’s security and licensing department, Pinchas Ezerzer, also testified to the commission on Thursday and said that he warned authorities of an imminent disaster several days before it actually occurred.
“I sensed that something was wrong when I saw the schedule of the hadlakos,” Ezerzer said. “So I sent my own schedule and suggested that all the hadklaos be held at the same time in order to disperse the people, disperse the crowd. I brought up this idea to several authorities several times but no one paid attention to me. I didn’t have much power.”
“Several days before [Lag B’Omer], they summoned me for a fire drill,” Ezerzer continued. “In the middle, I got up and said: ‘If you don’t ensure that the passageways remain clear, we’ll have a disaster on our hands.'”
Earlier this week, the demolition of the bleachers near Rashbi began, as can be seen in the video below. According to a Kikar H’Shabbat report, all the bleachers at Meron will be demolished by the end of this week.
מירון: צוותי הריסה בליווי דחפור פועלים כעת במתחם גנדי והורסים את הטריבונות. pic.twitter.com/6Y8LKsH08L
— שימי שפר (@Shimishafer) September 29, 2021
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
Sadly, the universal themes of bureaucrats is that “I didn’t think”, “I didn’t know”, “I assumed”, etc.
As a legal matter, its also generally hard to indict and successfully prosecute a government employee for stupidity or failure to exercise common sense. At the end of the day, the board of inquiry will issue a report, make recommendations, and not much will really change.
the police did it
“The whole time there were people passing through and everything was going smoothly. Suddenly there was terrible crowding. I looked up and saw five police officers who were simply standing there and stopping people from passing. People begged, cried, screamed that they’re going to die, that they can’t breathe, but they didn’t open the passageway. Children were fainting in their parents’ arms. When the police finally allowed people through, everyone collapsed one on top of the other.”
Menachem, a hasid from Tzfat, told of a violent clash he had with police not long before the disaster, and claimed that the police who secured the incident “came here with fire in their eyes.”
“My nephews saw policemen standing here a minute before the incident,” Menachem added, blaming the police for the disaster “as soon as it became crowded people started to leave. There was nothing out of the ordinary. People shouldn’t say ‘this is from heaven.’ There was murder here. I don’t know whether it was malicious or accidental, I do not judge anyone, for that there are the professionals to decide. But we don’t understand why the police who were here are not being detained until the end of the proceedings. If I had been involved in an accident in any way, I would have been arrested until the end of the proceedings.”