Lod Mayor: We’ll Throw the Book at Siren Fireworks Perpetrators

As Israelis commemorated the memory of the 23,646 fallen members of the security forces and 3,134 victims of terrorist attacks, Hy”d, some – in the central Israeli city of Lod – were “treated” to a fireworks show, with the explosives going off just as a siren announcing the beginning of Memorial Day was sounded Tuesday night.

While there is no law requiring anyone to stand at attention while the commemorative sirens are sounded on the eve and day of Memorial Day, it is generally considered very bad form to move about in public, and traffic generally comes to a halt. This year, Israel Railways even stopped trains that were in transit for the minutes the sirens sounded on Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, and Memorial Day on Tuesday night and Wednesday.

Many religious Jews take the opportunity to say Tehillim for soldiers killed in battle as the sirens are sounded, while the secular public generally stands and reflects on the losses. In the Arab sector, the siren is far less “respected.”

Angry residents inundated police with phone calls demanding that those who set off the fireworks be tracked down – and police traced them to an apartment building in an Arab neighborhood of Lod. Speaking to Channel 20 Tuesday night, Lod Mayor Yair Revivo said that “police are in the midst of raiding the house where these fireworks were fired from. I promise that the hand that set off those fireworks will curse the day it came into this world. This is a crossing of a red line that cannot be tolerated.”