[ad_1]
METERThe second nationwide lockdown to combat the corona epidemic, which began in Israel on Friday at noon, just hours before the start of the Jewish New Year celebrations, will remain in place for at least three weeks. The situation will be assessed after two weeks and exit restrictions will be extended for more weeks and slowly relaxed, until the government wants to return to its traffic light model, in which the particularly affected “red” areas are more cordoned off than the ones. “green” cities.
Jochen stahnke
Political Correspondent for Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan based in Tel Aviv.
However, plans are currently reviewed almost daily in Israel. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Thursday that the government was considering further stricter restrictions, the cabinet decided to relax the exit restrictions that were initially adopted: instead of five hundred meters, you can now move one kilometer around your place of residence. But there are many exceptions, for shopping and work, for sports, for demonstrations, for pet care, for example. So what if you take your jogging clothes to the New Year’s party with friends who live further afield and come before the lockdown? Many acquaintances assume that not all are compliant with the regulations anyway. “It’s a big mess.”
“Uncontrollable and irresponsible”
The government’s crown commissioner Ronni Gamzu, who was only appointed in July, did not even participate in the crown press conference on Thursday night. Gamzu’s original goal of preventing a national shutdown and instead protecting only particularly affected areas, which were in fact initially concentrated in Arab and ultra-Orthodox residential areas, could not be enforced by the government. “We came out of the first confinement in record time, uncontrollable and irresponsible,” Gamzu said in a separate appearance. “When the virus returned, we ignored it,” said the commissioner, who barely concealed his criticism of Netanyahu. “We had not developed a comprehensive strategy. Essential decisions were delayed or made in a disorganized manner. “
In the synagogues, the restrictions that have now been issued are comparatively relaxed; in any case, depending on the severity of the infection statistics, ten or 25 people can pray together in a “capsule” that is separated from the next “capsule” by a plastic film. In some ultra-Orthodox communities it is already evident that they do not want to adhere to it. Around 7,000 police and soldiers should now understand and enforce the new regulations, with the support of local government employees. A police officer said that the police will prosecute those who violate the congregation’s rules for prayer or hold large celebrations at home, but said they do not want to exaggerate and “do not want to enter every house.”
The closure is also intended to avoid mass gatherings during the high holidays in the coming weeks, beginning with the New Year’s festival Rosh Hashanah, followed by the most important holiday, Yom Kippur, and a little later the Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkot. . Schools and kindergartens were closed Thursday in an ad hoc decision. Health Minister Juli Edelstein said the opening of Talmud schools and schools a few weeks earlier had led to another dramatic spike in infections. Until then, their herds had been identified primarily in Arab-Israeli and ultra-Orthodox areas, while the virus is now spreading across the country.
Demonstrations against Netanyahu
For now, the restrictions are in place for three weeks, but could be longer. Edelstein set a goal of reducing the daily number of new infections to 1,000 before restrictions were relaxed again. In Israel, the number of new infections has been one of the highest in the world for two weeks. From Thursday to Friday, significantly more than five thousand cases were reported again, which is proportionally more than twenty times more than in Germany. The death toll, on the other hand, is a comparatively low level with a total of 1,169 (0.6 percent of all infections), which some attribute to the young population of Israel. However, the director of Rambam Hospital in Haifa cautioned against dismissing Corona as a disease of the elderly. “The average age of people who are seriously ill with ventilators is fifty (in Israel),” said Michael Halbertal.
A few hundred people demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the measures and against Netanyahu on Thursday night. While the prime minister achieved his greatest foreign policy success through normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, this is not reflected in polls. They barely changed after the normalization announcement and continue to give their Likud significantly fewer seats than in the spring elections. The outcome of the closure and the handling of the Corona crisis will likely decide the new elections that are expected next spring.
