IDF says it’s monitoring workers buried under rubble

The IDF Home Front Command is working to locate and extract all of the seven workers trapped underneath the rubble of the parking garage, the army unit says.

Forces at the scene have determined the exact location of one worker using cellphone signals and “are now working on it,” it adds in a statement.

Meanwhile, the locations of six others “have been estimated and are being monitored,” the statement says.

The disaster site has been divided up into five sections, with the Home Front Command’s national search and rescue unit working on two of them and the Ram, Shachar and Tavor battalions each taking one.

A crane, along with a special sand-suctioning truck, has been brought in to clear away some 250 tons of rubble, but there is still “a lot of work being done by hand,” according to the statement.

The area is still considered hazardous. The portions of the parking garage that have not collapsed “are dangrous and unstable,” an engineering assessment said.

— Judah Ari Gross