No room to maneuver

A deadly motor vehicle accident crash on Route 6 makes front page news with four dead and dozens injured. Among those killed in the accident — when an intercity bus collided with a truck parked on the shoulder — were two IDF soldiers. The papers report that the police are investigating possible criminal negligence on the part of the bus driver.

Israel Hayom loads up the story with drama, opening its coverage of the incident with quotes from eyewitnesses who liken the crash to “a terrorist attack” and “a battlefield.”

“Four people were killed and another 39 injured, four of them seriously” the paper reports, clocking casualty figures unmatched by the rest of the press. Its headline — in black, white and red — calls the vehicle “The bus of death.”

Maariv quotes a senior police official saying the trailer “stopped on the side of the road, and the bus traveling southbound struck its side. As a result it shaved off the right side of the bus.”

“We are investigating the reason why the truck stopped on the side of the road, and why the bus driver didn’t notice the truck,” Chief Superintendent Noam Baginski said.

The injured were hospitalized across the country, with victims sent for treatment at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, Ichilov Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Barzilai in Ashkelon and Kaplan in Rehovot.  

Yedioth Ahronoth quotes an anonymous police source saying that their suspicion is that “the bus driver was engaged in something else and took his eyes off the road. He didn’t keep his distance and when he discerned the truck it was already too late.”

According to Haaretz, authorities suspect the bus driver may have been talking on the phone or may have dozed off. The truck, it reports, was parked on a section of the toll road without a proper shoulder, and part of the vehicle jutted into the right-hand lane.

A police source who spoke to Yedioth noted that “the shoulders are very narrow on Route 6. On the stretch of road in which the accident took place their width is less than two meters. Every stop on the road endangers passengers.” 

Haaretz also reports on 13 Israel Railway employees who are suspected of embezzling millions of shekels from the train company. According to the report, the employees, 12 ticket clerks and one district manager, are suspected of selling tickets to passengers and pocketing the cash. Seven already admitted to stealing thousands of shekels per month.

The file has yet to be handed over to the police, but someone close to the matter told Haaretz that it was merely “the tip of the iceberg.”

Israel Hayom and Maariv are helping the Health Ministry in its push to vaccinate all Israeli children under the age of nine and a half to get polio vaccinations. According to the former, approximately 150,000 children of southern Israel are set to be vaccinated against the virus after the ministry ran tests and found more traces of the disease in the sewage of southern cities.  

“In a given moment, 1,000 people or more are carrying and disseminating the virus,” Health Ministry Director Professor Roni Gamzu told the press. He reassured the public that the risk of vaccination was zero, which is what Maariv runs as its headline. The paper offers instructions for parents on how to get their kids vaccinated. In case Gamzu’s credibility was in question, Maariv brings in another doctor to write an op-ed and re-reassure concerned parents that “in practice it bears no danger.”

“It is a safe vaccine,” Dr. Shlomo Vinker writes of the orally delivered medication, “especially when it’s given after vaccination by injection.”

Ran Reznick writes in Israel Hayom that the not-quite-polio-outbreak is “the most serious public health incident [in Israel] in the past 30 years,” and that while it’s the right move to vaccinate children, it comes too late. He asks where the preventive medicine that could have averted the not-yet-catastrophe from possibly happening has been.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the government on Sunday earmarked funds for urban development and that an unprecedented 90 settlements got budgeted in, whereas lower-income cities such as Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi missed out. Further, some of the settlements getting development funds are isolated West Bank communities, like Bruchin and Rehelim, far from the major settlement blocs.

The paper explains that the funds are “principally grants and project advancements” for “matters such as housing, infrastructure, industry, education, or culture which amount to as much as tens of millions of shekels.”

Even though he abstained in the cabinet vote on the measure, Environmental Protection Minister Amir Peretz objected verbally, saying “It can’t be that Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi are off the [national priority] map because of their proximity to the center of the country, though their socioeconomic situations are difficult, but, through a security threat clause, they insert settlements outside the blocs, including settlements which until recently weren’t legal.”