THOUSANDS OF mourners attended the funeral yesterday of Israel’s top female police officer, Brig Gen Ahuva Tomer, who died from severe burns sustained in Israel’s worst forest fire to date.
The head of the Haifa police station had volunteered on Thursday to escort a bus carrying 40 prison cadets to the scene of the blaze when the fierce flames engulfed both vehicles, killing almost everyone.
President Shimon Peres said Israel had lost an extraordinary personality. “The fire annihilated so much and with Ahuva, it has now taken the best of the best.”
Brig Gen Tomer, the first woman to head a major Israeli police station, commanded 500 officers as head of the Haifa station, the third-largest in Israel.
Israel’s police chief Dudi Cohen, said the force had lost a real heroine.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has come under severe criticism in the wake of the blaze, turned down an offer by a pro-Israel-American Christian charity to donate fire engines to Israel.
The Jerusalem Post reported that the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which raises money for Israel among Christian supporters in North America, had already donated eight fire engines to Israel and more were planned.
However Mr Yishai, from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, cut off all contacts with the organisation two years ago when he became interior minister.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are traditionally wary of Christian groups, even pro-Israel organisations, fearing they ultimately aim to convert Jews to Christianity.
In a special debate on the fire in Israel’s parliament yesterday, opposition members called on Mr Yishai, who holds ministerial responsibility for the fire services, to resign. However the Shas leader said he was the victim of a “lynch” because he was ultra-Orthodox, right wing and Sephardic.
The fellowship decided to donate fire engines after the second Lebanon war in 2006, when Israeli firefighters struggled to extinguish dozens of fires in the north of the country started by Hizbullah missiles.
Israel’s chronic shortage of firefighters and fire engines was one reason why the weekend fire in the Carmel forest spread so quickly, forcing 17,000 people to flee their homes. According to International Labour Organisation figures, Ireland has one firefighter for every 1,108 citizens, while Israel has one for every 7,000 citizens.