Israel to hold earthquake drill after several small quakes rattle country

An earthquake drill will take place at 11:05 on Monday morning in a number of towns and cities throughout the country, the Home Front Command announced.

The locations will include several towns in the Jordan Valley, as well as the cities of Kiryat Shmona, Beit She’an, Acre and Nesher in northern Israel, and Arad and Dimona in southern Israel.

Sirens will be activated in order to test the capability of providing real-time warnings in case of an earthquake.

While residents were originally asked to install the Home Front Command app on their phones, the IDF later announced that due to a technical issue, an alert will not be sent out on the app.

The large drill comes after several earthquakes have been felt in Israel over the past month.

On January 11, a large 6.5-magnitude quake hit off the west coast of Cyprus and was felt in nearby Israel, Lebanon and Turkey.

Less than two weeks later, two small earthquakes rattled northern Israel within hours, leading to the evacuation of a school in Afula and the city hall of Beit She’an.

And last week, another quake off the coast of Cyprus was felt in Israel, in what the Cypriot geological survey department said was an aftershock of the large temblor that occurred off the east Mediterranean island on January 11.

Cracks that appeared in a building in Tiberias following an earthquake on January 23, 2022, prompting an evacuation of residents. (Screenshot: Twitter)

There were no reports of injuries or serious damage in either case, but the unusual amount of recent tremors felt in parts of the country has led some residents to believe a larger quake was on the way.

In 2018, the state ombudsman warned Israel is woefully unprepared for a major earthquake. Nearly four years later, and not much has changed. Some have blamed the lack of political stability that paralyzed the country for two years and the absence of a state budget for three years, now passed.

Geological experts have recently warned that some one million homes in Israel are at risk of collapse in case of an earthquake. According to other estimates, a major earthquake could cause about 7,000 deaths and 145,000 injuries, with 170,000 people left homeless and 320,000 buildings damaged.

In 2005, the Israeli government approved the TAMA 38 plan — an urban initiative designed to encourage tenants to strengthen their buildings’ structures.

A building that has undergone refurbishment and expansion through Tama 38 next to a building that has not. (YouTube screenshot)

However, it takes at least three years to have a building approved for TAMA 38, with the waiting period rising to almost five years in more populated sections of the country like the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

According to public broadcaster Kan, since 2005, only 27,000 buildings have been reinforced under the plan.

Israel lies along an active fault line: the Syrian-African rift, a tear in the earth’s crust that runs the length of the border separating Israel and Jordan.

The last major earthquake to hit the region was in 1927 — a 6.2-magnitude tremor that killed 500 people and injured 700 — and seismologists estimate that such earthquakes occur in this region approximately every 100 years.