JERUSALEM (EJP)—A committee investigating the conduct of the operators of the Judea and Samaria Police emergency hotline the night of the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers on June 12 found that there was a “severe failure of conduct.”
The findings, published on Monday, focused on the phone call received on the night of the kidnapping.
On June 12th at about 10:25 P.M., a phone call was made by one of the three Israeli teens who had been kidnapped, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel. The call lasted just over two minutes and a single voiced whispered the words, “they kidnapped me”, after which the phone went silent. The phone call was reportedly made just minutes after the kidnapping; it was not however handed over to the appropriate security personnel until one of the boy’s parents reported him missing almost five hours later.
According to the report, the operator called over the shift supervisor, a police sergeant major, who tried to speak with the abductee and call back the traced number no less than eight times. The manager was also informed of the call, and both reached a decision that night not to look into the call any further.
The report’s findings state that according to protocol, the hotline staff should have tried to locate the identity of the caller and to try and track the owner of the mobile phone and then assess the location of the caller.
The probe described a “mishandling of the telephone call received at the center, as far as the professional standards expected from emergency hotline operators on all levels, and which included all the ranks: police, officers and commanders involved.”
As a result of the findings, the Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino dismissed some officers involved in the incident, among them the chief operations officer and the head of the command and control center. Neither will be able to serve in any position of authority over the next three years. The emergency hotline’s shift supervisor and manager will also be dismissed, and their continued service in the police will be examined.