The Home Front Command and the Education Ministry will hold a drill for all
schools and kindergartens in Israel on Thursday morning, simulating a missile
and rocket attack during school recess hours.
A siren will ring out
across the country at 10:05 a.m.
Emergency services, including the Israel
Police, Magen David Adom and the Fire and Rescue Services will take
part.
The drill is aimed at improving the responses of schools to missile
attacks, and to increase cooperation between local authorities, schools and
emergency services.
Some 4,500 schools and kindergartens will take part,
and the Home Front Command will dispatch 60 instructors to schools around the
country.
The IDF will also test out its text messaging alert systems,
sending messages to selected cell phones with mock rocket alerts.
No
response from the general public is necessary.
Last month, a senior
military source told The Jerusalem Post that the Home Front Command is preparing
all hospitals in Israel for a range of security threats, including large-scale
missile and chemical attacks.
The preparations have been planned three
years in advance, and bear no relation to current events or recent threat
assessments.
Exercises include training hospital staff to deal with
conventional missile attacks, mass casualty incidents and “mega-mass casualty
incidents” – involving 1,000 or more injuries.
“We train a lot for
chemical weapons,” the source said. “This is our business, and only ours. There
is no room for error,” he added.
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