The Turkish disaster: Since the earthquake, many expeditions from around the world visited the area of destruction in an attempt to help locate and rescue trapped people who are still alive. Nissim Mashal and Guy Peleg spoke on 103fm with Lt. Col. (Rest.) Doron Ziv, from the rescue team of Israel’s Home Front Command, who shared details from the field.
“Tonight was a fascinating night, like the night before. A night that in terms of the weather is very difficult, but the motivation is in the sky, the adrenaline is flowing, we are investing everything we have to save lives in the last remaining hours,” Ziv said at the beginning of the conversation. “We managed to rescue a record number of eight prisoners alive, eight people who are alive today, which probably would not have happened if we had not reached them in time. It is very important for us to give everything we have so that we can get a few more and help a few more, because in the end time A very significant factor in the rescue.”
He also explained that “the first 24-48 hours the percentage of success is the highest and they go up and down quite quickly in hours. I would say another two or three days, this is the window of opportunity to give us everything possible. On the other hand, there are miracles, in the rescue mission in Haiti even after 10 days They were taken alive from the ruins. We are here as long as we can give from what we have, to save lives and help the population. This tragic event, we are not the story, the story is the event that happened here and the whole world that came to help.”
In addition, Ziv spoke about the Turkish government’s aid to the areas of destruction: “In this context, we are witnessing a wonderful effort on the part of the Turkish people and the government. The amount of aid that arrives here from all over Turkey is nothing short of amazing. Countless of the heavy rescue vehicles they brought here, food distribution points, really very The mobilization of the entire Turkish people is impressive. The authorities are very mobilized, but what is very amazing is to see the people themselves, the population itself. We arrive at a site of destruction, enter the site, start searching and suddenly find voices of life, within a second hundreds of people are standing outside and all they want is to help And they help, most of the work is manual labor. It’s very impressive. Despite the tragedy, they are all focused on saving their brothers, their neighbors, their family members.”
“Do they know you are Israelis?”, the pair of presenters wondered, and Ziv replied: “They know we are Israelis, everyone asks where you are from, we proudly say from Israel. The expressions of affection and respect we receive are very demonstrable, everyone is grateful from the bottom of their hearts. I think that this delegation, I have no doubt that certainly among the population here the hearts have warmed significantly towards Israel. Our base is the center of activity for all the rescue units that have arrived in the area, there are several dozen delegations but most of the delegations are delegations of 8 people, 12, 14 and two dogs, our delegation is unusual in scope Hers, and in the composition. We have 150 rescue and rescue personnel, now the field hospital has also arrived, which is a game changer. This is about the amount of people that Israel brought, equal to a considerable part of all the delegations together that came from abroad.”
About the weather during the rescues, he shared: “Terribly cold, last night minus 6 degrees and we are working outside. We are well equipped, winter clothing, everything we need, and a lot of motivation that is enough to get rid of the frozen fingers.”
“The trapped call for help all day and all night”
In addition, Ziv talked about the hard work involved in rescuing the trapped among the ruins: “The nights are our most important factor, we manage to locate the most people. The night is quiet, during the day there is noise. The trapped call for help all day and all night, at night we hear better. At night, this is the time when not only we locate, run to us and call to us in order to tell us, ‘We support living voices,’ and there were actually several cases where I ran following these calls and saved people.”
“We are in the city that suffered the worst damage. We are talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of destroyed buildings, high-rise buildings. We have no shortage of points of interest, everywhere we turn there is a site of destruction with dozens of families on the site that were affected. We follow the major centers and go methodically. While we locate through intelligence operations and the study of the population targeted information on places where the chances are higher and in the process we move the forces in real time from point to point,” he emphasized.
Finally, Ziv admitted that as part of the extensive rescue operations carried out by the delegation, the forces use the most modern technology in the field, in order to save as many trapped people as possible: “We have with us the sting unit with the dogs trained to identify live trapped people, but mainly our main weapon in this story of locating the trapped It is the concept of intelligence developed by the Home Front Command, which says that all the information available on a certain point, a certain house or a certain prisoner is collected, cross-referenced with engineering information on the structure, and in very fast processes, most of which are technological, they manage to isolate points where the chances are much higher, and really in these points we find most of the prisoners alive. It is a privilege for us to represent the State of Israel and the IDF. We are not the story, the State of Israel and the IDF who joined the effort. This is the real story.”