Crush at Israeli religious festival kills 44

At least 44 people were crushed to death at an over-crowded religious bonfire festival in Israel on April 30, medics said, in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a "heavy disaster".   

The crush occurred as tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews thronged to the Galilee tomb of 2nd-century sage Rabbi Shim Bar Yochai for annual Lag B'Omer commemorations that include all-night prayer, mystical songs and dance.   

Witnesses said people were asphyxiated or trampled in a tightly packed passageway, some going unnoticed until the PA system sounded an appeal to disperse, as crowds packed the Mount Meron slope in defiance of COVID-19 warnings.    

Helicopters ferried injured people to hospitals and the military said search-and-rescue troops were scrambled.     Medics said 103 people had been injured in what they described as a stampede.

Casualties included children, witnesses said. The site is mostly gender-segregated and bystander video suggested the crush took place at one of the men's sections.   

"We were going to go inside for the dancing and stuff and all of a sudden we saw paramedics from (ambulance service) MDA running by, like mid-CPR on kids," Shlomo Katz, 36, told Reuters. He then saw ambulances come out "one after the other".      

Videos posted on social media showed chaotic scenes as Ultra-Orthodox men clambered through gaps in sheets of torn corrugated iron to escape the crush. Bodies lay on stretchers in a corridor, covered in foil blankets.   

A police spokesman said overall capacity at Mount Meron was similar to previous years but that this time bonfire areas were partitioned-off as a COVID-19 precaution. That may have created unexpected choke-points on foot traffic, Israeli media said.   <...