BREAKING NEWS

Bennett urges Israelis to keep distance from elderly

Defense Minister Naftali Bennett urged Israelis to keep their distance from the elderly population in order to protect them from the coronavirus outbreak on Tuesday.
Bennett referred to the recommendation as "Operation Grandmother," calling contact with elderly people "the most dangerous thing."
"All of us have the responsibility to hug and cover our grandparents in love, on the phone and with food, but not by getting close to them. If we get close, we risk their lives in a significant way," said the defense minister, warning that there were likely people carrying the virus among those present where he was speaking.
Bennett made the comments while visiting the Dan Panorama hotel in Tel Aviv, which was converted into a quarantine center on Monday.
The first infected people are expected to arrive to the new quarantine hotels on Tuesday afternoon.
"I say now to the public: We will beat this incident together. We are in a situation unprecedented in the past 100 years. The large goal is to located carriers and to quarantine them from the population," said Bennett, adding that Israel is currently experiencing an exponential growth of the outbreak.
"The national goal is to slow the spike [in cases] so that we don't get to an Italian situation in which hospitals collapse due to overcrowding, in which a doctor needs to choose who lives and who dies, the grandfather or the father. We don't want to get to that situation," added Bennett.