A few hours after at least 45 people were crushed to death at an Israeli festival in honor of the Jewish festival Lag Baomer, more and more harrowing stories of eyewitnesses are emerging. “It felt like an eternity,” says one of the injured about when things went wrong local media. “Dead people were all around me.”
Children were also killed in the disaster. Some 150 people have been taken to hospitals, according to aid organizations; some are in bad shape.
The head of the emergency services says in one statement that it is “difficult to describe the scale of the disaster”. An ambulance worker, who was one of the first to arrive, describes the chaos he found: “It was hard to see. Dozens of people were injured in a narrow alley, some were injured. People were screaming in pain.”
Big crowds
On Mount Meron, believers gathered yesterday around the tomb of a second-century rabbi. Fifty people may actually be present at the grave, but at one point there were more than five hundred. More than 100,000 people were estimated to have gathered at the festival.
“The exit was not wide enough,” said an eyewitness at Haifa hospital:
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