IDF girds for long-term battle with coronavirus
Military prepares to release troops for furlough; soldiers helping in Arab towns hit by disease, cooperation largely good despite strained ties, army spokesman says
Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.
The Israel Defense Forces began preparing “coping strategies” as it gears up to face the coronavirus pandemic for months to come, the military spokesperson said Thursday.
“In the past week, we’ve formed a number of teams under the deputy chief of staff to look at dealing with the coronavirus for the next few months — I don’t know for how many months,” IDF Spokesperson Hidai Zilberman said.
Zilberman said many of the military’s immediate, dramatic responses to the crisis were not sustainable in the long term and thus would have to be reconsidered going forward. He said those included both policies within the military and the manner in which the IDF has been taking part in the national effort to confront the disease.
“In the IDF, we don’t talk about an exit, but coping,” he said, referring to a number of government proposals to resume a more normal routine.
As an example of the issues currently being discussed by IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir’s teams, Zilberman offered the case of reservists who were brought into service in the Home Front Command, the unit that has been at the vanguard of the military’s assistance to Israeli civilians. As reservists, these troops will eventually have to be released, though their assistance is still desperately needed.
Speaking to reporters, the spokesman noted that the military was starting to ease some of the restrictions put in place on its troops by releasing them home beginning Sunday for three to four days of rest.
He said that included the roughly 1,400 troops currently helping police enforce the national lockdown, who would soon be replaced by a fresh crop of soldiers.
Zilberman said the effort to release troops for furlough was a “very complicated logistical and medical operation,” as the IDF must both try to prevent the troops from contracting the coronavirus while on leave and ensure that any soldier who does become infected will not spread it to his or her comrades when they return.
To address the first issue, before leaving base, the troops will be briefed on the social distancing regulations they were told to follow and will be sent out either in private cars driven by their family members or in shuttles organized by the military.
The IDF hopes to accomplish its latter goal by bringing the soldiers back gradually, using its so-called capsules method of creating self-contained shifts of troops, so if one of them does contract the disease while on furlough, only the other members of their capsule will be susceptible to infection.
The military has been using this method for several weeks in other units.
The soldiers coming back from their furloughs will remain in these capsules — not interacting with the others — for the full incubation period of the virus, before being allowed back into normal, albeit restricted, contact with one another.
According to Zilberman, 131 soldiers or civilian employees of the IDF are currently sick with the coronavirus, while another 42 had the disease but recovered. All of them displayed only light symptoms. Another roughly 1,600 people in the military are in quarantine.
Arab cooperation
In the phone briefing, Zilberman also discussed the military’s ongoing efforts to assist local governments with high incidences of the disease, including, increasingly, in Arab towns.
He said Israeli troops had so far delivered roughly 200,000 packages of food and hygienic products to residents of Arab towns and cities that were hit hard by the virus. Some 90,000 packages were provided to residents of Bnei Brak, along with 60,000 to Jerusalem residents, as both cities have seen soaring rates of coronavirus infection.
He said the military’s cooperation with the Arab towns was “working well” — an apparent reference to the often strained relationship between Arab Israelis and the country’s security services.
Zilberman acknowledged that there had been a small number of cases in which municipalities requested that soldiers not deliver packages to certain homes and instead allow municipal workers to do so, in order to avoid any conflicts or friction.
Asked if there were any cities or towns where soldiers were not permitted to enter out of concerns for conflict, Zilberman said this had not yet been an issue, but acknowledged “there may be some in the future.”
In addition to delivering food, the military was working to help evacuate residents of Arab towns who contracted the coronavirus or required quarantine in a closed facility. IDF troops were also helping the Magen David Adom ambulance service set up drive-through testing facilities in Arab areas, including East Jerusalem, Deir al-Asad, Jisr az-Zarqa, Fureidis and others.
