Deadly stampede in Israel followed political pressure to allow festival

As Israelis watched for updates on the conditions of a score of survivors of Thursday night’s disastrous stampede on Mount Meron, multiple reports in the Israeli press suggested that government officials yielded to political pressure from religious lawmakers to place no limits on the number of attendees.

An 11-year-old boy, one of the youngest injured, was taken off a ventilator and was fully conscious Saturday morning, the Jerusalem Post reported. He was among 21 victims in the hospital for treatment of injuries sustained when the massive festival turned deadly. The incident, being called the deadliest peacetime tragedy in Israel’s history, left 45 dead, including six Americans mostly from the New York metro area, and 150 injured. It started when some of the packed crowd of ultra-Orthodox pilgrims moving through a narrow, slippery walkway that ended with a flight of stairs at the mountainside gravesite of a revered rabbi, fell down. Others fell on top of them and what some called an “avalanche” of humans resulted.