Two men fell to their deaths from the 40th floor of an apartment block under construction in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
The two men were identified as East Jerusalem residents Ghazi Abu Sbeitan and Ahmad Ziyad al-Sayyad.
The two, in their thirties, worked on the site of a luxury apartment complex on Harav Nissim Street in the Bavli district.
The circumstances of the fall weren’t immediately clear, but it appeared the accident happened when a mechanical platform on the side of the building collapsed.
Haaretz daily said it was the third time in years that construction workers had been killed when mechanical scaffolding platforms collapsed. Two men died at a downtown Rosh Ha’ayin site in 2018, and a worker was killed in a similar incident at a Tel Aviv site last year.
There was no prosecution related to any of these deaths.
The Bavli Park building where two workers fell to their deaths on February 9, 2022 (Israeli Police)
Deaths of construction workers in Israel are common, mainly due to poorly enforced safety regulations.
Hadas Tagri, head of the group against construction and industrial accidents, told Haaretz that ministers must take measures and legislate to ensure workers’ safety.
“We have been warning the Minister for Economic Affairs for many months [Orna Barbivai] and her deputy Yair Golan on the precarious security situation of workers, on construction sites and in general, and outlined a number of steps that need to be taken to promote their security,” Tagri said.
“We have repeatedly urged the reform minister to expand responsibility for safety on construction sites, to push ahead with the establishment of a national safety agency, and to present targets and a detailed work plan to promote worker safety in 2022 before more workers are harmed,” she has added.
Seven construction workers have been killed in on-the-job incidents this year, according to the newspaper’s tally.
