A four-level subterranean parking lot nearing completion of its construction on HaBarzel Street in the Ramat Hahayal neighborhood of Tel Aviv collapsed Monday morning, September 5. At least three persons were killed and 23 were injured while several are still said to be missing. Those injured and rescued from the site were evacuated in various conditions to a number of hospitals in the vicinity including Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv and Tel HaShomer in Ramat Gan. Some of the lightly injured have already been released to their homes.
Emergency services and rescue teams were immediately called to the scene to recover the injured and missing buried in the rubble. A spokesman from the police told Ynet, “Several floors of the building collapsed. There’s a danger of an additional collapse of both the building and the surrounding area because of the pit that was created by the collapse.” As darkness fell on the site, rescue operations continued. Channel 1 television reported that these operations will carry on through the night and apparently into tomorrow.
Interviewed by Channel 1 during a visit to one of the local hospitals, MK Aiman Odeh, head of the Joint List, called for the formation of an governmental investigative committee into the collapse of this building, specifically, but no less so than into the spate of construction accidents that plague Israel nearly daily. Odeh told reporters that, not counting this most recent event, since the beginning of this year, 32 workers have died as a result of construction accidents. At the current rate, this is a 50% increase in the number of deaths over 2015, when a total of 34 construction workers died in accidents at their work sites.
MK Aiman Odeh (Hadash) head of the Joint List addresses protestors from the Hadash faction in the Histadrut during a demonstration outside the Ministry for the Economy demanding the resignation of the minister in charge – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – following the government’s inaction in combating work-related accidents, particularly in the construction sector, February 8, 2016.
Even before this year’s spike in construction accidents, the rate of work-related deaths in Israel was among the highest in Western capitalist countries, twice that of the European Union average according to the findings of a report released by the Economics Ministry and the National Insurance Institute. In 2015, a total of 54 laborers died in work-related accidents and over 50,000 workers were injured. Most of the 34 construction workers who died last year (21) fell to their deaths.
Seven months ago, in the wake of the rise in the number of workers killed in construction industry accidents, the Hadash faction in the Histadrut demonstrated outside the Ministry for the Economy demanding the resignation of the minister in charge – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A spokesman for the faction, Itamar Avnery said at the time, “For the government, these workers are invisible: Jewish workers from disadvantaged populations, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinians from the West Bank, and foreign workers, most of whom are employed as contract workers. They are workers without protection, without rights!”
Among the various manifestations of government apathy towards the plague of construction accidents is the number of building inspectors the state employs. A source interviewed by Channel 1 Monday evening related how, to supervise safety conditions in the 13,000 ongoing construction sites in Israel, the state has a mere 18 inspectors, meaning that, on the average, each inspector is theoretically responsible for more than 720 sites: “A drop in the ocean,” said the source.
The construction industry in Israel is, of course, big business. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, GDP from construction in the country averaged NIS 9.353 billion (approximately $US 2 billion) from 2000 until 2016. In the first two quarters of 2016, quarterly estimates for GDP from construction averaged NIS14.5 billion, or approximately $US 3.8 billion annually. Naturally, construction is a branch that can reap huge profits for building companies, large, medium, and small. Therefore, some observers have remarked, a large part of the increased incidence of building accidents is due to the pressure being placed on by entrepreneurs on governmental authorities to relax regulations in the branch.
The building site that collapsed in Tel Aviv on Monday morning belongs to Danya Cebus Construction Ltd. a privately owned subsidiary of Israel Africa Investments. Back in February of this year, Globes, Israel’s daily business newspaper, reported that Ronen Ginsburg, CEO Danya Cebus, had been questioned by Israel’s Antitrust Authority on suspicion of price fixing in construction contracts. The investigation relates to suspicions that infrastructure and procurement tenders in the town of Shoham, near Ben Gurion Airport, were unlawfully biased.
