Israel on Sunday marked a national day of mourning over the crush Mount Meron that killed 45 people, including over a dozen children and teenagers, in the country’s deadliest-ever civilian disaster.

Flags were lowered to half-staff at the Knesset and President Reuven Rivlin’s official residence, and ceremonies were expected at the Knesset and army bases.

A cabinet meeting scheduled for Sunday was canceled. Concerts and sports events were postponed. And the Jerusalem school system announced it would dedicate its studies on Sunday to the tragedy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the day of mourning after visiting Mount Meron on Friday. “There were heartbreaking scenes here. People who were crushed to death, including children,” Netanyahu said in a video from the scene.

With 45 dead and dozens injured, the disaster in the early hours of Friday is believed to be the worst peacetime tragedy in Israel’s history, surpassing the death toll of 44 from the 2010 Mount Carmel forest fire.

Beit HaNasi remembers the 45 people who lost their lives in the Har Meron disaster.

May they rest in peace.

Photo credit: Mark Neyman (GPO) pic.twitter.com/t6EcJ1LSrC

— Reuven Rivlin (@PresidentRuvi) May 2, 2021

The victims included at least a dozen children and teens, including two sets of brothers, as well as young fathers and rabbis. They included at least 10 foreign citizens, among them six Americans, a British national, two Canadians and an Argentinian.

More than 100,000 people were attending the annual Lag B’Omer gathering on Thursday in the northern Galilee, which includes visits to the gravesite of 2nd century sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai and massive bonfires on the mountainside. A bonfire lighting ceremony for the Toldot Aharon Hasidic sect was being held at the pilgrimage area, close to Bar Yochai’s tomb.

As the dense crowds began to exit, a narrow, sloping walkway on the exit route became immensely congested, people slipped on the metal floor and others fell on them, precipitating fatal crushing, exacerbated by a reported police barrier at the bottom of the incline.

On Sunday morning, the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv said it had finished identifying all 45 bodies from the deadly crush. It also said 44 bodies had been released for burial, and the remaining body would be released during the day at his family’s request.

Many of the victims were buried on Friday and Saturday night.

At least 20 people remained hospitalized on Saturday, a number of them in critical or serious condition.

The condition of several people hurt in the crush improved over the weekend. A 52-year-old man who was seriously injured returned to full consciousness at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. At the same hospital, the condition of an 11-year-old boy who was seriously injured also improved.

As the initial shock and horror over the deadly crush began to subside, focus started to turn on Friday toward the matter of who was to blame for the packed conditions at the site and the security dangers. Two state comptroller reports highlighting that the Mount Meron site was radically unprepared for the huge numbers attending the annual festivities, in 2008 and 2011, were ignored, as was a 2016 police report that sounded similar warnings.

The site, the second-most visited religious site in Israel after the Western Wall, appears to have become a kind of extraterritorial zone, reports indicated Friday, with separate ultra-Orthodox sects organizing their own events and their own access arrangements, no overall supervision, and police routinely pressured by government ministers and ultra-Orthodox politicians not to object.

Questions will likely be directed at political, civil and law enforcement officials involved in planning, approving and securing the event, amid talk of a potential state commission of inquiry to thoroughly investigate the disaster.

Public Security Minister Amir Ohana said Saturday night he bears overall responsibility, “but responsibility does not mean blame.”

Facing criticism for staying largely silent since the disaster, Ohana, who oversees police, wrote in a Facebook post that he planned to face the public once the dead were buried.

“I am ready to face any probe and answer any question,” Ohana said.

Source: TOI

Header: The Knesset Guard lowers Israeli flags to half-staff outside the Knesset in Jerusalem as a national day of mourning begins for victims of the Meron disaster, May 2, 2021. (Noam Moskowitz/Knesset)