ISRAEL: DOZENS OF INFECTED PILGRIMS CAUGHT RETURNING FROM UMAN WITH WITH BOGUS NEGATIVE TESTS

Sat 11 September 2021:

Israel has announced that it will prosecute dozens of pilgrims who flew back into the country with fake negative Covid test results.

The pilgrims were in Uman, Ukraine, for the annual celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, where Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the founder of the Hasidic Breslov sect in the early nineteenth century, is buried. He was a great-grandson of Hasidism’s founder.

This year, between 25,000 and 30,000 pilgrims, mostly from the Breslov sect, came to Uman in central Ukraine. The Jerusalem Post reported that up to 14% of those returning tested positive for Covid, according to Israel’s Magen David Adom medical agency.

2,000 pilgrims returning from Kyiv had tested positive for Covid, according to the medical service, which had set up testing centers in Uman and at the airport in Kyiv. At the request of the Israeli government, the service dispatched a team of more than 100 medics and paramedics to Uman to assist in the testing of pilgrims.

Following a tip, police spotted pilgrims with fake papers as they landed in Israel, bringing them home for required quarantine amid suspicions that hundreds of people may have obtained false tests.

Hundreds of people who tested positive in Ukraine boarded planes with false negative tests, according to the Israeli border and immigration agency. According to the Ynet website, 13 people on a single trip from Kyiv had forged tests.

The prime minister, Naftali Bennett, condemned the scam. “The Israeli government takes a very serious view of patients who fraudulently enter Israel by falsifying documents and deliberately spread disease, which constitutes an irresponsible act of harming public peace,” his office said.

Bennett said anyone caught using forged paperwork would be prosecuted, including potential charges of fraud, forgery and deliberately spreading disease.

The issue comes at a particularly difficult time for Israel, which had hoped that the latest wave of the Covid pandemic, which was caused by the Delta variant, had been brought under control.

FILE PHOTO

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