Bnei Brak blocked by IDF as death toll climbs to 36
One million people infected worldwide, 7,000 in Israel
The government approved a closure on the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) city of Bnei Brak on Thursday as 10 people died in Israel from coronavirus, the highest number in one day so far, and infections worldwide soared to more than a million people.
Paratroopers will be deployed in Bnei Brak to work with Home Front Command.
The soldiers will have personal protective equipment like the police and will help Home Front Command with logistics, evacuating the sick and giving out food to highrisk populations, IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Hidai Zilberman said. Several hundred troops will increase the IDF’s role in the fight against the pandemic. They are undergoing special training for the mission.
Some 12,000 soldiers and 3,000 vehicles are taking part in the effort against the virus, and “next week there will be many more,” Zilberman said.
One out of seven Israelis who are sick with the novel coronavirus are from Bnei Brak, the Health Ministry reported Thursday.
About 900 people in the city of some 200,000 have COVID-19, an increase of 177 patients, up about 25%, in the last 24 hours. Jerusalem’s 900,000 residents have 916 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 15% from Wednesday.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Petah Tikva and Haifa have begun to stabilize. There are 324 cases in
Tel Aviv (up 8%) and 127 in Petah Tikva (up 2%). In Haifa, the number remained at 81.
At a meeting of the Knesset Coronavirus Committee on Thursday, Maccabi Health Services CEO Ran Saar said his fund handles the healthcare of half of Bnei Brak’s residents, and “according to various indications, about 38% of the local residents are ill, which is 75,000 people.”
If the city is not policed over Passover, “the situation will worsen,” he said. “Bnei Brak is a city with a high percentage of elderly people. We will find ourselves with a lot of dead people in Bnei Brak.”
With such a high rate of infection, some 4,500 elderly residents of the city aged 80 years and over will be evacuated and placed into isolation in quarantine facilities operated by Home Front Command at a cost of NIS 75 million.
Eight hotels have been transformed into coronavirus quarantine facilities.
In addition, the new restrictions will make it very difficult for people to enter or exit Bnei Brak. Residents will only be allowed to leave to receive medical care that they cannot get in the area, to handle required legal matters, to attend a funeral of an immediate family member or to transfer children between divorced parents. Local police
officers, soldiers and medical professionals will be allowed to leave to fulfill their civic duties.
The only people who will be allowed in will be rescue workers, police, soldiers, health, social or welfare workers and journalists. Access will also be granted to bury the dead or distribute food and other essential items.
“Instead of making statements at 9 p.m. and complimenting himself, the prime minister should have focused on Bnei Brak,” MK Yoel Razvozov (Yesh Atid-Telem) said at Thursday’s committee meeting. “Instead of waiting for God to save us from coronavirus, the health minister should have focused on Bnei Brak.”
Health Minister Ya’acov Litzman and his wife, Chava, were diagnosed with coronavirus on Thursday, the same day that 10 Israelis died from COVID19 and the Health Ministry announced that some 6,857 people have been infected in the country.
In total, 36 people have died in Israel from coronavirus and 338 have recovered.
Of the sick people, some 108 are in critical condition; 87 are on ventilators.
Worldwide, the global number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus has surpassed 50,000. There are more than a million cases. The top five countries with coronavirus are the United States (216,722), Italy (110,574), Spain (110,238), China (82,431) and Germany (77,981), according to data provided by Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University.
Despite the new regulations, a small handful of extremist protesters, reportedly a splinter group from the Jerusalem Faction, which is itself an extremist group, demonstrated on Bnei Brak’s Rabbi Akiva Street against the social-distancing orders, describing them as “the awful decrees of destruction of the closure of all Torah study halls and synagogues.”
In addition, radicals from the faction held a prayer service in the Ponovitz Yeshiva. They were soon evicted by the police.
Other members of the same group sought to pray outdoors in several spots in the city, eliciting protests from concerned neighbors who shouted at them from windows and doorways to leave, calling them “heretics” for ignoring the Halacha of protecting one’s own life and that of others.
Coronavirus is plaguing the country financially, too. According to data published by the Israeli Employment Service, the number of unemployment benefit claimants climbed to over 1,036,500 on Thursday, or 24.9% of the workforce.
Since the start of March, almost 880,000 new applications have been received by the Employment Service. Among the new applicants, 89.2% are employees placed on unpaid leave, and 6.6% have been made redundant.
In a phone call on Thursday, the government approved an emergency order to provide