Bennett: Give Defense Ministry and IDF overall responsibility now to manage pandemic

Defense Minister Naftali Bennett tells Channel 12 that responsibility for managing the coronavirus pandemic must be transferred immediately to his office and the Israel Defense Forces below it.

“The Health Ministry is making every effort,” he allows, and the Defense Ministry, the Mossad and “all of us” are doing everything they can to help. “But I have to say that if we want to cope with this [pandemic], if we want to reopen the Israeli economy, then all responsibility for managing the coronavirus crisis — from A to Z — must be transferred to the IDF and the Defense Ministry as quickly as possible. We’re in a war. We’re in a tough biological war, against nature. But it’s a war with colossal logistics. With a million elderly people.”

The Health Ministry should help determine policies. But it’s not designed as an operational hierarchy, he notes. “We wouldn’t let a geologist run the [nationwide]  operation to save the people from an earthquake.”

Already, he says, the IDF is deployed in Bnei Brak. It’s involved in testing. It’s taking responsibility in facilities for the elderly.

“The greatest lesson to learn from other countries,” he says, “is to appoint one person to run the whole operation… We’re in a war the likes of which we’ve never known.”