Carmel fire family petitions court over ministers’ malfeasance

The family of a Carmel fire victim petitioned the High Court of Justice on Wednesday to demand that the prime minister explain why he did not dismiss the ministers responsible for the 2010 disaster.

Retired police major general Zeev Even-Chen, father of the late Topaz Even-Chen Klein, and her widower, Amit Klein, called on the court to press Benjamin Netanyahu to explain why Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz were not dismissed for their mishandling of the crisis.

The petitioners also asked the court to probe Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich as to why senior police, firefighting, and prison service officials, who the state comptroller’s report found culpable, were not fired either.

The Carmel fire report, released last month by former State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss, listed a number of failures by the state in preparing for and battling the massive blaze in the Carmel forest a year and a half ago, in which 44 people died. Much of the blame was laid at the door of Yishai and Steinitz for reductions in budgets and inadequate preparations that left the nation’s firefighting capabilities lacking.

The plaintiffs’ attorney wrote that his clients’ appeal aims to “set a norm of personal responsibility and ministerial responsibility” and to ensure that “the loss of the victim, and members of other families who lost loved ones in disaster, will not have been in vain.”

“Would we allow the CEO of a corporation to keep his job after so critical an auditing report exposed his failures?” attorney Moshe Shahal wrote.

Shortly after the report’s publication in June, Even-Chen’s family demanded that Netanyahu dismiss Yishai and Steinitz because of their specific responsibility for the government’s shortcomings in combating the 2010 inferno. They urged Netanyahu to use his legal authority to fire the ministers.

Having received no reply from the prime minister, the Even-Chen family appealed to the High Court of Justice.

“A situation in which there is responsibility but no one is held responsible is unacceptable,” the family members wrote in a letter to the prime minister last month.

Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran ruled late Wednesday that the prime minister, finance minister, interior minister and public security minister must respond within two months to the filed petition.