A team composed of Foreign Ministry, Home Front Command and the IDF Medical Corps personnel left for Haiti on Wednesday at noon after the island suffered a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake, the worst in 200 years.
Led by Daniel Saban, head of ministry’s Latin America department, the delegation will also include members of the IDF Search and Rescue Unit. The IDF Medical Corps plans to set up a field hospital in Haiti.
Brig.-Gen. Shalom Ben Aryeh, commander of the Home Front Command’s Search and Rescue teams, said the contingent consists of 50 IDF officers trained in rescue operations as well as giving emergency medical treatment.
Experience from previous cases, Ben Aryeh said, teaches that the first few days are the most critical for finding survivors trapped under the rubble.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry said it had received the details of four Israelis who have not made contact since the quake. The ministry was in constant contact with the missing people’s families. One of those missing was Sharona Elisye, daughter of the late peace activist Abie Nathan, who has been living in Haiti with her husband.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu instructed the professional echelon in the Defense Ministry to urgently act in order to send humanitarian aid to the country, according to a statement issued by the PMO.
“In order to assess the damage on the ground and in order to tailor the aid to the [island’s] needs, a professional team of Home Front Command personnel will leave for Miami in order to shorten times to Haiti. The Israeli ambassador to the Dominican Republic was instructed to travel to Haiti in his car and to report the situation,” the statement read.
Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch instructed Israel Police to prepare forensics units that would, in the first stage, help in identifying victims and in the second stage help in preserving the peace. The move was coordinated with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry.
Amos Radyan, Israel’s Ambassador in the Dominican Republic, who also serves as the envoy to Haiti, said that since the telephone lines were down, the embassy had not yet managed to contact the Jewish families in Haiti nor the honorary consul in the country.
The scope of the disaster remained unclear Wednesday, and even a rough estimate of the number of casualties was impossible. But it was clear from a tour of the capital that tens of thousands of people had lost their homes and that many had perished. Many buildings in Haiti are flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions.
The powerful earthquake struck Haiti’s capital on Tuesday with withering force, toppling everything from simple shacks to the ornate National Palace and the headquarters of UN peacekeepers. The dead and injured lay in the streets even as strong aftershocks rippled through the impoverished Caribbean country.
Women covered in dust crawled from the rubble wailing as others wandered through the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares late into the night, singing hymns. Many gravely injured people still sat in the streets early Wednesday, pleading for doctors. With almost no emergency services to speak of, the survivors had few other options.
Thousands of buildings were damaged and destroyed throughout the city, and for hours after the quake the air was filled with a choking dust from the debris of fallen buildings.
“The hospitals cannot handle all these victims,” said Louis-Gerard Gilles, a doctor and former senator, as he helped survivors. “Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together.”
UN peacekeepers, most of whom are from Brazil, were trying to rescue survivors from their collapsed five-story headquarters, but UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said late Tuesday that “as we speak no one has been rescued.”
“We know there will be casualties but we cannot give figures for the time being,” he said.
Many UN personnel were missing, he said, including mission chief Hedi Annabi, who was in the building when the quake struck. Some 9,000 peacekeepers have been in Haiti since a 2004 rebellion ousted the president.
Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said its embassy was destroyed and the ambassador hospitalized for undisclosed injuries.
The National Palace crumbled into itself, but Haiti’s ambassador to Mexico Robert Manuel said President Rene Preval and his wife survived the earthquake. He had no details.
The 7.0-magnitude quake struck at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday, centered 15 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of 8 kilometers, the US Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti. In 1946, a magnitude-8.1 quake struck the Dominican Republic and also shook Haiti, producing a tsunami that killed 1,790 people.
The temblor appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, said earthquake expert Tom Jordan at the University of Southern California. The quake’s size and proximity to populated Port-au-Prince likely caused widespread casualties and structural damage, he said.
“It’s going to be a real killer,” he said. “Whenever something like this happens, you just hope for the best.”
Most of Haiti’s 9 million people are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of the buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.
Tuesday’s quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, and some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes. But no major damage was reported there. In eastern Cuba, houses shook but there were also no reports of significant damage.
Jpost.com staff and the Associated Press contributed to this report.