When air raid alarms rang out in central Israel on March 9, a  crane operator was only starting his way down from the cab in which he was hoisted high above a Yehud building site.

“I came down and barely made it. I got the alert, waited for them to disconnect me from the load, closed up the crane and went down,” the crane operator told the Haaretz news outlet. “It took a few minutes, and time was running out; by the time I started descending, the siren had already begun.”

As he ran to a nearby underground parking garage for protection, he recalled seeing fellow workers Rustam Gulomov and Amid Murtuzov.

“Ten seconds after I made my decision and went down to the garage, there was the boom. I went back up after half a minute and just saw them lying there on the floor,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t gone inside.”

Gulomov and Murtozov, both from nearby Petah Tikva, were killed by the apparent cluster munition that impacted at the site. The two were not in a bomb shelter at the time of the attack, according to a preliminary investigation, despite having access to protected spaces.

It’s unclear why the pair did not seek shelter, but neither was it an anomaly. Workers in a handful of industries deemed essential — including construction, agriculture and residential care — are often left exposed when missile alerts are triggered, whether from lack of nearby shelter, the nature of the work itself, or other constraints that keep them from reaching safety.

On February 28, the first day of the US-Israel conflict with Iran, the National Emergency Authority — which coordinates Israel’s civilian home front during emergencies — published an updated list of workplaces classified as part of the “essential economy” during a national state of emergency. The designation allows certain sectors deemed critical to basic civilian life and the functioning of the economy to continue operating during wartime.

After the Yehud tragedy, the chief of the Home Front Command, Maj. Gen. Shai Klapper, said that dozens of other construction workers survived the attack after entering bomb shelters.

“We had a serious incident at this construction site, where several people were injured. At the same time, I want to say that there were dozens of workers whose lives were saved. Their lives were saved because they were in a protected space and followed the guidelines,” he said in a video published by the military.

Meytal Russo, vice president of Kav LaOved, a legal aid group for disadvantaged workers, said the incident “highlights a dangerous gap between the guidelines on paper and the reality on the ground.”

The deaths, she added, provided “shocking evidence that the state is allowing the construction sector to operate at the expense of workers’ safety.”

Under Construction and Housing Ministry guidelines, work is permitted only at sites with proper protective infrastructure. Home Front Command restrictions also prohibit work at sites where........

© The Times of Israel