The state commission of inquiry into the Meron disaster resumed hearing testimony on Thursday, during which head safety engineer Amer Khalaila admitted that he never once evaluated the safety of Gesher Dov, the narrow passageway where the terrible disaster occurred. “You never actually evaluated the gesher?” former Supreme Court President Miriam Naor, the head of the commission, asked him. “Did you check it to ensure it met safety standards?” “Since it was already there for several years, I didn’t check if it met safety standards,” Khalaila responded. “So in your view, if you received something from the past, then it’s okay?” Naor asked. Khalaila, who failed to evaluate the safety of Gesher Dov even once in his seven years in his position, even suggested that maybe the disaster was the fault of the people visiting Meron. Naor responded by scolding him to remove that factor completely off the table. Kahlaila also testified that the number of people he estimated could safely enter Har Meron was about a third of the number of the people present when the disaster occurred. However, it became clear during his testimony that although he was present at Meron on Lag B’Omer and saw that the number of people arriving at the mountain was far more than he had deemed safe, he failed to issued a warning about it. Commission member Maj.-Gen. (res.) Shlomo Yanai asked him: “You signed a safety document and said that you didn’t know that there would be over 5,000 people at each hadlaka. You said that that surprised you. You suddenly see that that there are 70,000 people on the mountain. You didn’t think of issuing a warning?” Khalaila responded: “I told the officer that the place is very crowded.” Khalaila also mentioned the fact that Meron was extremely crowded due to the fact that Lag B’Omer was on a Friday, which meant that there was a shorter time period for people to visit and they all came at once. Additionally, he said: “The difference between previous years to this year was that Toldos Aharon always lit at the last moment and whoever remained were only the chassidim themselves. This year, they were the second hadkaka and therefore there were many people there.” The former head of the police department’s security and licensing department, Pinchas Ezerzer, also testified to the commission on Thursday and said that he warned authorities of an imminent disaster several days before it actually occurred. “I sensed that something was wrong when I saw the schedule of the hadlakos,” Ezerzer said. “So I sent my own schedule and suggested that all the hadklaos be held at the same time in order to disperse the people, disperse the crowd. I brought up this idea to several authorities several times but no one paid attention to me. I didn’t have much power.” “Several days before [Lag B’Omer], they summoned me for a fire drill,” Ezerzer continued. “In the middle, I got up and said: ‘If you don’t ensure that the passageways remain clear, we’ll have a disaster on our hands.’” Earlier this week, the demolition of the bleachers near Rashbi began, as can be seen in the video below. According to a Kikar H’Shabbat report, all the bleachers at Meron will be demolished by the end of this week. […]

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