Israel Matzav

47% of Israelis don't have gas masks

I've been warning about this for years, and now Haaretz is picking up on it too. If God forbid there is a war here, Israelis are woefully under-equipped. 47% of the population doesn't even have gas masks.

But besides threatening to attack, one must also ask what defensive measures Israel is taking to prepare for the possibility that chemical weapons will indeed fall into dangerous hands. The answer is rather worrisome.

Four years ago, after lengthy delays, the Israeli government decided to renew the distribution of gas masks to the public. After another two years of bureaucratic wrangling, a decision was made to fully fund the project, so that every a mask for every citizen would be assured.

But that decision was never implemented. “To this day we haven’t seen a single additional shekel more than what was decided from the start,” an IDF source said.
To date, the Home Front Command has distributed gas masks to 53% of the public.

A new campaign that Israel Post has launched recently on the Internet makes the especially dramatic claim that, “Some 4.2 million citizens have equipped themselves with protective kits. Only a very limited inventory remains.” The postal service is the state’s subcontractor for the gas mask distribution project, having won the Defense Ministry tender. Its messages are fully coordinated with the Home Front Command and have its approval.

So what about the other 47 percent? The problem, the IDF says, is not the readiness of the public to obtain the kits, but two other obstacles: budget and the annual production capacity.

Theoretically, to equip every resident with a gas mask would require another NIS 1.3 billion. But the pace of production is also a problem. Today there are two firms that manufacture gas masks – Shalon, which manufactures them, and Super-Gum, which refurbishes old ones. Even if the money was available and both these production lines were working at top capacity, it would still take two years to make all the needed kits. There’s simply no way to accelerate the pace further. And unlike in the past, Israel can no longer rely on being able to buy gas masks abroad. The production of such protective kits for the civilian market essentially stopped at the end of the Cold War.

What could go wrong?

Labels: chemical weapons, gas masks, Syria

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:00 AM