A month after the Meron disaster, the head of the Mevo'ot HaHermon Regional Council Beni Ben Muvchar issued an administrative cancellation order for a religious festival due to a lack of safety precautions. The celebration was scheduled to take place in a month at the gravesite of Rabbi Yonatan Ben Uziel. It gathers tens of thousands of visitors annually.
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"Every year, the Holy Sites Authority submits a request for the celebration 30 days before the event [as is required by law], but this year for the first time, they submitted no request," Ben Muvchar explained.
What is even more surprising, he added, was that the council invited the representatives for a meeting, but they did not arrive.
"The police, the fire and rescue services and Magen David Adom told me the site is not safe, and I decided to issue the cancellation order. Also, representatives of the Local Planning and Building Committee inspected the site and discovered that all structures had been built without permits."
In a letter he sent to the Holy Sites Authority, Ben Muvchar also added that the Planning and Building Committee's engineer deemed the site's bear-loading walls at risk of collapsing, that the access routes to the area were winding and narrow, that the site had no safety rails and "according to experts, there are no suitable escape routes for rescue vehicles."
The council extended the cancellation order to include several days before and after the original date of the festival after it found out that worshippers planned to arrive at the site earlier and stay until the festival on Saturday (June 5).
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