Bennett defends ‘difficult’ plan to close military cemeteries on Memorial Day

Interim Defense Minister Naftali Bennett defends the government’s plan to shutter the country’s military cemeteries for next week’s Memorial Day out of concern that people would visit them en masse and potentially spread the coronavirus widely.

“This was a very, very difficult decision, but it was necessary as every year some 1.5 million people visit cemeteries, many of them elderly,” Bennett tells reporters.

“This would have been a coronavirus bomb,” he says.

Under the plan, which has yet to be formally approved by the government but is expected to be shortly, police officers will be stationed outside the cemeteries and roadblocks will be set up in the surrounding streets to ensure that people do not visit their loved ones’ graves.

Bennett says he hopes that these precautions will not be necessary and that family and friends will not try to visit the cemeteries, but adds that if they do, police officers will show the utmost restraint.

“A bereaved father is not going to be physically stopped from visiting a cemetery on Memorial Day,” he says, adding, “But we expect that people won’t come.”

— Judah Ari Gross