JERUSALEM (VINnews) — After numerous delays, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai testified before the commission of inquiry into the Meron Tragedy on Monday. Shabtai stated that he was the person with overall responsibility for security but stressed that “responsibility is not necessarily blame.”
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Shabtai said that in 2008 in the wake of the State Comptroller’s report, the responsibility for the site was transferred to the Committee of Five responsible for holy places but no official organizer of the event had been appointed by them. “I knew that nobody was willing to take responsibility,” Shabtai said.
Shabtai explained that he personally could not be held accountable as he had just entered his position after the preparations for the event were in full swing and had many other issues to deal with at the time, including elections, coronavirus, Ramadan and the tiktok terror attacks spreading in Israel. The subject of Meron had not been raised in his initial briefings with senior officers.
Shabtai stressed that the main responsibility for the disaster rested with Northern District Police Commander Shimon Lavi, who had already taken responsibility for the disaster immediately afterwards – but had also said that responsibility does not mean blame.
“This is a district incident – it is under the command of the commander of that district,” Shabtai explained. “Even if there is help from other districts, there is an advantage to the cumulative experience of the district police officers.”
However Shabtai emphasized that “Shimon Lavi is one of the most talented and experienced commanders in the Israel Police. I had full confidence in his skills and abilities, and I have full confidence in him even today. Shimon Lavi has proven and is proving every day his ability to face the challenges of a district commander, and is bringing the district to remarkable achievements.”
Shabtai dismissed claims by former head of the police operations division Amnon Alkalay that he had received recommendations to restrict the crowds at each bonfire but ignored them. According to Shabtai, the decision on restrictions was not in the hands of the police but rather the political echelon
According to Shabtai, the decision on the format of the restrictions was transferred to the political echelon, since “it is not the police who are authorized to decide whether there will be restrictions.”
He added that “the issue of overcrowding was at the heart of the program and everyone addressed it. Neither the head of the operations division nor any other person had expressed any doubts or presented any failures in the plan, or an alternative plan. No operations division representative expressed any doubts or demanded corrections until the plan reached the national level.”
Shabtai also criticized the government’s performance on the problem.
“The inability of the various government ministries to reach an agreed wording of regulations was a clear expression and reflection of the basic difficulty that has accompanied the Meron event for years,” he said, an “inability, and perhaps unwillingness, of the political echelon to regulate the event, as well as physically regulating the site itself.”
THE POLICE chief said that in a discussion with the ministers and then-corona commissioner Prof. Nachman Ash, “the political echelon decided that the event would be in the format of an open mountain with no restrictions on the crowd’s entry…but with a restriction at each bonfire.”
Shabtai said that police could not count the participants at the bonfires accurately, so they were aided by helicopters, quadcopters and cameras, and that the Dov Bridge, where the disaster occurred, is not part of the bonfire area but a side passage.
“What happened at that given moment that made people go I do not know,” said Shabtai. “For me, these are questions that remain open. They tried to regulate this mountain for a decade, but four government committees did not solve the problem. All the problems solved between the Northern District and the Holy Places Foundation are local initiatives of the Northern District.”
According to Shabtai, the failure that led to the disaster was related to engineering rather than police.
“Like in the Versailles wedding hall disaster and the Maccabiah disaster, it would not have happened if there were no people,” he testified, referring to the May 24, 2001, disaster in which 23 revelers at a wedding were killed, and the July 14, 1997, catastrophe at the opening of the Maccabiah Games when a bridge collapsed over the Yarkon River and four people were killed.
“For a disaster with an engineering failure to happen, it also needs density,” Shabtai said. “We did not know in advance about the failure at the Dov Bridge. I do not know what caused that crowd to run there. Even if there was a crowd and pressure, without the engineering failure there would have been no disaster – without the slipperiness and slope of the bridge. I am not a safety engineer and I do not cross every path and every bridge. We do not understand that. There were safety engineers who did it.”
The deliberations of the commission of inquiry have shown so far that the police had no choice but to serve as an integral part of the incident, but this, in turn, avoided restricting the visitors to the mountain despite all scenarios that warned of a disaster.
Ash, who served as coronavirus commissioner during the disaster, pointed an accusing finger at the police and the Religious Services Ministry, which he said had avoided management of the incident. In a conversation with the police about keeping the restrictions set, Ash was told that they would “take care of it.”
“My feeling was that the outline was realistic, that there would be someone to enforce it,” he said.