Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that Israel would be confined again for at least three weeks, in an attempt to curb Covid-19 contamination.

It is the first hard-hit country to reimpose containment.

Back to square one of the pandemic?

Israel on Sunday evening became the first country strongly affected by the coronavirus to reimpose national containment, of at least three weeks, in an attempt to stem a second wave of contamination.

"Today, the government has decided to implement a strict three-week lockdown with the option to extend this measure," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address.

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1,119 deaths recorded for a population of nine million inhabitants

According to data collected by AFP, Israel is the second country in the world with the most cases of the novel coronavirus per capita in the last two weeks after Bahrain.

From the end of August, with in particular the reopening of schools coupled with the holding this summer of weddings sometimes bringing together hundreds of people, the infection rate started to rise again with 155,604 cases of Covid-19 on the counter, including 1,119 deaths, for a population of nine million inhabitants.

A little-respected curfew

Faced with this increase, the authorities last week imposed a curfew on around 40 cities in the country, especially in the Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sectors, which did not prevent the number of cases from increasing with the key to "overwhelmed" hospitals and medical staff, Netanyahu said.

Confinement during Jewish holidays

With the approach of the Jewish holidays, the country lived the last days under the sign of a debate, sometimes intense, between supporters of a "seger khelki" and others of a "seger clali", that is to say between defenders of partial or general containment.

The government not only opted for the second option, but extended the measure to at least three weeks, during all Jewish holidays, in an attempt to limit the spread of Covid-19 as families gather and worshipers reunite. in synagogues.

"Our aim is to stop the rise," said Benjamin Netanyahu, with a table of data to tell Israelis, thousands of whom have demonstrated in recent weeks against the government's handling of the pandemic, that the country's economy has suffered less from Covid-19 than those in France, Germany or the United Kingdom.