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Thursday, January 20, 2005

PA crank-calls Israeli ambulances

Another example of the depravity of the enemy.

Luckily, so far no one has coordinated a crank call to a terror attack elsewhere.


The directors of Magen David Adom in the Lachish region held an unusual news conference this week - rather than trying to raise funds or persuade people to donate blood, they were announcing the development of a new telephone system designed to screen crank calls to the organization's Ashdod hotline.
According to the director of the Ashdod hotline, Yehuda Gabai, the new system, which has been under development for several months and will become operational within a few weeks, is needed to deal with the hundreds of crack calls the hotline receives every day.

Gabai says that most of the calls are placed by Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, who call the emergency 101 number, curse the operator and then hang up. More disturbingly, the crank callers will try to report a fictitious emergency, hoping that MDA will waste valuable time and resources until the truth comes to light.

The new system, however, will allow MDA to define a list of `problematic' telephone numbers - numbers from which crank calls have been placed - and automatically block the calls from reaching the call center.