Israel stampede news — latest: At least 44 dead and 150 hurt in ‘great tragedy’ at religious festival

At least 44 people were crushed to death at an overcrowded religious bonfire festival in Israel, medics said, in what they called a stampede.

Here is a list of some of the worst stampedes over the last three decades:

April 1989: Ninety-six people were killed and at least 200 injured in Britain’s worst sports disaster after a crowd surge crushed packed fans against barriers at the English F.A. Cup semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield.

July 1990: Inside Saudi Arabia’s al-Muaissem tunnel near the Muslim holy city of Mecca, 1,426 pilgrims are crushed to death during Eid al-Adha, Islam’s most important feast, at the end of the annual haj pilgrimage.

May 1994: A stampede near Jamarat Bridge in Saudi Arabia during haj kills 270 in the area where pilgrims hurl stones at piles of rocks symbolising the devil.

April 1998: One hundred and nineteen Muslim pilgrims are crushed to death at the haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

May 2001: In Ghana, at least 126 people are killed in a stampede at Accra’s main soccer stadium when police fire tear gas at rioting fans in one of Africa’s worst soccer disasters.

Feb 2004: A stampede kills 251 Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia near Jamarat Bridge during the haj ritual stoning of the devil.

Jan 2005: At least 265 Hindu pilgrims, including several women and children, are killed near a remote temple in India’s Maharashtra state.

Aug 2005: At least 1,005 people die in Iraq when Shi’ites stampede off a bridge over the Tigris river in Baghdad, panicked by rumours of a suicide bomber in the crowd.

Jan 2006: Three hundred and sixty-two Muslim pilgrims are crushed to death at the eastern entrance of the Jamarat Bridge when pilgrims jostle to perform the haj stoning ritual between noon and sunset.

Aug 2008: Rumours of a landslide trigger a stampede by pilgrims in India at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh state. At least 145 people die and more than 100 are injured.

Sept 2008: In India, 147 people are killed and 55 injured in a stampede at the Chamunda temple, near the historic western town of Jodhpur.

July 2010: A stampede kills 19 people and injures 342 when hordes of young people push through a tunnel at the Love Parade techno music festival in Duisburg, Germany.

Nov 2010: A stampede on a bridge in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, kills at least 350 people after thousands panic on the last day of a water festival.

Jan 2013: Over 230 people die after a fire breaks out at a nightclub in the southern Brazilian college town of Santa Maria, and a stampede crushes some of the victims and keeps others from fleeing the fumes and flames.

Oct 2013: Devotees thronging across a long, concrete bridge towards a temple in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh panic when some railings break, triggering a stampede that kills 115.

Sept 2015: At least 717 Muslim pilgrims are killed and 863 others injured in a crush at the haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabi.

Bel Trew, our middle east correspondent, reports:

The stampede disaster which killed at least 44 people in northern Israel is one of worst Israel has ever seen, medical officials have told The Independent. 

Eli Bin, the director general of Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom (MDA), said that they had prepared more than 250 ambulances and intensive care vehicles from all over the country for the religious festival in Mount Meron.

However the teams had never experienced anything like the horrific events over night, he added. 

“This is one of the most difficult civil disasters the state of Israel has ever known and it is difficult to contain the magnitude of the disaster,” he said. 

Uriel Goldberg, international relations coordinator and paramedic for MDA, also said that he has not known of a worse stampede in Israeli history. 

“It’s definitely one of the worst disasters in recent times,” he told The Independent.  

MDA said that they received the first distress calls just before 1am near near the “Toldot Aharon” celebration, near the Rashbi tomb in Meron.

MDA paramedic Omri Hochman, who was one of the first to arrive to treat the injured, said: ” The sights were very difficult, dozens of wounded lay in a narrow corridor and next to it. Dozens more walked around suffering from various injuries.

“There were cries of pain, sighs and there were those who lost consciousness and needed resuscitation.”

MDA paramedic Maor Atadgi added: “We rescued the injured from piles of people and performed resuscitation operations on people who were fatally wounded… In all my years at MDA, I do not remember such a heavy disaster.”

Goldberg told The Independent they were currently hosting blood drives across the country and preparing for the funerals.

Those involved in the crush or who witnessed it have been giving their accounts of what happened.

Avraham Leibe, who was injured in the stampede, told Israeli public broadcaster Kan a crush of people trying to descend the mountain caused a “general bedlam” on a slippery metal slope followed by stairs.

“Nobody managed to halt,” he said from a hospital bed. “I saw one after the other fall.”

Another man, who was identified only by his first name Dvir, told Israel Army Radio: “Masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created.”

He described a terrifying sight as the first row of people fell down and said he was in the next row of people that tripped.

“I felt like I was about to die,” he said.

“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,” 36-year-old Shlomo Katz, who was at the site at the time of the crush, said.

The 36-year-old then saw ambulances come out “one after the other”.

Additional reporting by agencies

Condolences are coming in from the international community this morning.

Governments and their officials from around the world have expressed their sympathies after deadly stampede, including from Romania, Germany and India:

The European Parliament’s president also said he was “greatly dismayed” by the tragedy:

The stampede at Mount Meron in northern Israel was one of the country’s deadliest civilian disasters.

Officials have confirmed 44 people were killed in the stampede.

The death toll is on par with the number of people killed in a 2010 forest fire, which is believed to be the deadliest civilian tragedy in the country’s history.

Additional reporting by AP

Mid-morning on Friday in Israel, efforts were still under way to identify victims and connect families with missing relatives.

In the overwhelmingly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv, officials were working with healthcare workers to connect the families of the missing.

“The picture is slowly becoming clearer,” Kivi Hess, a municipal spokesperson, told Channel 13 TV.

The station published the photos of seven boys and teens and asked for help in locating them.

In a race against time, funerals were to be held before sundown Friday, the start of the Jewish Sabbath when burials do not take place.

Here are some images of people at the site in the aftermath of the stampede:

The US embassy official has offered condolences after the “tragic news” from Mount Meron:

Dozens of people have been crushed to death during a stampede at a religious festival in northeast Israel on Friday, rescue services said.

Footage taken just moments before the deadly incident at the base of Israel’s Mount Meron showed heaving crowds of black-clad ultra-Oorthodox worshippers crushed in a narrow tunnel-like passage as they exited the site.

Bel Trew and Namita Singh report: