The cause of the collapse is yet to be known.
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Israel Defense Forces are leading the rescue effort and teams worked around the clock to locate and extract the construction workers. The military’s Home Front Command sent about 150 members of its special search-and-rescue team to the scene.
Three more workers had been trapped under the structure but were rescued after firefighters dug a tunnel to them through the rubble and sand.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site last night to inspect the search operations. The garage collapsed during a lunch hour, when some construction workers were eating outside.
“All of a sudden everything collapsed”, the man, Micha Lavine, identified by Channel 10 TV as a project manager at the site. Speaking to reporters at a hospital, he said he was blown backward by a blast and lightly injured. “We are very anxious if we will succeed in reaching those same people whose voices we can definitely hear”.
The circumstances of the collapse, which occurred in the Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hahayal high-tech neighbourhood, remain unclear.
The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper recalled an article from three years ago in which the leader of the Danya Cebus company which built the auto park allegedly said they had decided not to use a construction engineer to supervise the work, instead making do with an architect.
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According to a study released in May by Israel’s Ministry of Economy and the National Insurance Institute, the country has one of the highest rates of construction site accidents among Western countries, with 480 people killed between 2000 and 2015.
