Air and Sea Units Join a Search for a Missing Boy in Ashkelon

The Israel Police said it was running extensive searches for a missing four-year-old boy in the area of Hofit beach in Ashkelon, a coastal city in southern Israel. According to the police statement, forces from the Southern District were being assisted by the force's aerial unit, the maritime police and volunteers.

The statement was an appeal for public help rather than an account of events. Police asked anyone who knows where the boy is, or who holds information that could help locate him, to call the national emergency number, 100, or the Ashkelon station on 08-6771440. The police named the child; Israel.com does not name children. Nothing else was released: the statement did not describe when or in what circumstances he was last seen.

Where the search is happening

Ashkelon sits on the Mediterranean shore in the south-west of the country, roughly 19 kilometres north of Gaza, and is both a working industrial city and a beach resort. Britannica puts its population at about 153,000 as of 2022 and notes that the modern city, planned from 1950, was laid out with hotels and beachfront recreation areas along the coast. Its beaches draw large domestic crowds through the summer months.

The units that search a coastline

An appeal of this kind pulls in parts of the police that most Israelis never see. Alongside the ordinary district stations, the Israel Police operates a marine unit with boats and police divers and an aerial unit flying police helicopters, according to the force's published structure, which also confirms that 100 is the emergency number reachable from any telephone in the country. The Southern District is one of the force's regional commands and covers Ashkelon and the Negev.

Who the volunteers are

The volunteers referred to in the statement are a standing feature of Israeli policing rather than an ad hoc crowd. The Israel Police runs the Civil Guard, a volunteer body of citizens that assists with routine police work; reference material on the Civil Guard records roughly 70,000 volunteers as of 2004, most serving a shift a week on patrols and neighbourhood duties, with specialised sub-units for search and rescue and emergency medicine. The police statement did not say which volunteer bodies took part in this search.

What is still unclear

The statement did not say when the boy went missing, who he was with, whether he was at the beach at the time, or whether the search area extended into the water. It gave no description of him and no indication of how long the search had been running. Police also did not say whether the case was being treated as a disappearance, an accident or anything else, and issued no update in the release itself.