A building in southern Tel Aviv that was unoccupied due to renovations partially collapsed on Wednesday morning.
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality said the building was slated for demolition prior to its unexpected collapse, and instructed residents to stay away from the scene.
No injuries were reported in the incident on Nahalat Binyamin Street.
Israel’s Fire and Rescue Authority said it was conducting searches at the site alongside Israel Police and Magen David Adom paramedics to rule out the possibility of additional people being trapped in the rubble.
The authority added that the five construction workers inside the building were able to escape the building moments before its collapse.
Footage from the scene shows people running from the site as the building came down, sending smoke billowing across the busy Tel Aviv street.
Police announced that, due to the collapse, several roads in the area had been closed.
Some 80,000 buildings in Israel in danger of collapse
In 2021, a residential building in Holon collapsed after authorities evacuated 16 families out of safety concerns.
The evacuation was carried out after reports there had been an explosion in the building on Serlin Street. When firefighters and rescue workers arrived at the scene, they observed cracks in the building. Some residents who tried to leave their homes said they could not open doors because the building’s infrastructure had shifted, police said.
Following the 2021 incident, the Israel Builders Association warned that as many as 80,000 buildings in Israel, with about 300,000 apartments, are in danger of collapsing and must be reconstructed in the coming years to avoid calamity.
“We published this in a report that we submitted to the government in 2017, but this is something we have been saying for years,” said the association’s then-deputy director-general Shay Pauzner.
“The message is that Israel needs to start thinking strategically about this, because we are in the danger zone.”