A shrill cry by the bay

Choose your poison, the Hebrew papers seem to say on Tuesday morning: the Zika virus, Haifa’s pollution or Palestinian terrorism. The health emergency in Latin America and the northern city’s air quality problem dominate the front pages as public concern grows.

After the partial findings of a study came out indicating that babies around the northern metropolitan area have smaller heads on average, the health and environmental protection ministers held an emergency meeting and agreed to set up a professional task force to investigate the claims, Israel Hayom reports.

“We always grew up here in the shadow of the pollution of the industrial factories, but when you see the numbers it’s all the more disconcerting,” Shai David, a resident of Haifa suburb Kiryat Tivon, tells the paper.

Yedioth Ahronoth goes even harder on the personal angle than Israel Hayom, speaking to a mother of three from Kiryat Haim who works at Haifa’s Carmel Hospital and says, “It scares us to stay and live in this pollution, and we are thinking of moving to live in a more northerly place.”

“We really love living in Kiryat Bialik, and I always knew that the air we’re breathing is not so clean — but now that I’m a mother I feel a much greater responsibility,” Esther Tovi, 30, a mother of two with another on the way, tells the paper. “It’s already not just for myself, but for the girls, my chicks. I have no intention to play with their health or their futures.”

The paper’s columnist Ra’anan Shaked goes so far as to call Haifa “Israel’s little Chernobyl which directly threatens [residents’] welfare and that of their children.” He calls the situation a “horror film” worthy of Hollywood or China, but not Haifa. He shrilly decries the petrochemical plants and says that Haifa residents “woke up one morning to find that you’re a kind of Simpsons family — good people who live a few meters from a poisonous and deadly factory — you’ve got nothing to do but send your kid to school and continue raising your baby. And in the meantime, out of nowhere, your hair turns blue.”

“Does this sound reasonable to you? Does this sound like something that could — even at a distance — happen in Israel?” he asks. “This business — and above all it’s a business — has to stop. Now.”

Ran Reznick writes in Israel Hayom that it’s high time for Israeli officials to acknowledge the connection between the heavy industry in Haifa and the damaging health effects for the city’s residents. He calls for a reduction in air pollution in Israel, and says that “in order to rehabilitate the damaged trust the public has in health and environmental authorities, they must act in two main ways” — regularly publishing statistics on the air pollution and its health effects and having the ministries fund and approve research into the issue.

Haaretz, on the other hand, retains its sangfroid and speaks to health experts who say that the findings of the study published earlier this week were partial, didn’t undergo scientific examination, and “sow excessive panic.”

“The statistics were presented at a meeting of the committee in December and members of the steering committee didn’t approve them, because it’s a preliminary statistical and epidemiological model which has shortcomings,” a Haifa air pollution research official tells the paper. “There’s a high chance that it will turn out that there isn’t really any significant difference or differences whatsoever in the weight and size of the head among babies in different areas of Haifa.”

The IDF’s decision to put the Palestinian city of Ramallah on lockdown following a terrorist attack on Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint earlier this week gets front page treatment in Haaretz, which notes it’s the first time such a drastic step has been taken since the onset of violence in late September. Residents of Ramallah were barred from exiting the city, except for laborers working in Israel, humanitarian cases and Palestinian Authority officials. It reports that thousands of cars caused traffic jams leading in and out of the city north of Jerusalem.

The paper points out that the order came despite remarks by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot two weeks earlier that imposing a closure on Palestinian cities would be “a bitter mistake” and “it would work against Israeli interests.”

Israel Hayom, which pushes the story back to Page 7, notes that the closure of the city to most of its residents was only for a few hours, and quotes the IDF saying that the action was in no way intended to be collective punishment.