National Police Commissioner Yochanan Danino on Wednesday appointed a team of seven officers to examine how the police force handled a distress call placed by one of the kidnapped teens which was ignored for 5 hours on the night of abduction last Thursday night.
The announcement was made a couple hours after police played the tape of the call for the families of the missing teens.
Police said the committee will be headed by Commander Moshe Barkat, head of the policing branch of the Operations Branch of the Israel Police. The team is expected to issue their findings in the coming days police said.
Danino said Wednesday "I am aware of and understand the public criticism of how police handled the 100 call on the night of the kidnapping," before saying that he has noticed that some of the criticism against police recently "is cynical in nature and inappropriate".
Danino's announcement came a few hours after Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich said Wednesday that the public and press are justified in their criticism of the police for their failure to take seriously the distress call.
The distress call is two minutes in length.
"The criticism is justified, but I've also said that we must examine what happened and apply the lessons learned," Aharonovich said. Both Aharonovich and Danino have visited with the families of the missing teens in the past two days.
Aharonovich said that the tape "is very hard to understand" and also that at some point it will be released to the public. Others who have heard the tape, including Channel 10 reporter Roy Sharon said that tape is clear and not difficult to understand.
Israel Police have been under some of the harshest criticism in years this week, after it was leaked to the press that at around 10:30 pm Thursday night one of the three abducted yeshiva students called a 100 police dispatch center and told the operator two times that "we've been kidnapped" before the call cut off. The operator, a teenage "Shaham" officer performing their national service in the police, passed the call over to a supervisor who ruled that it didn't require following up or handing over to the security services.
The police only notified the security services some five hours later, when the father of one of the boys issue a police complaint and they realized it was connected to the call.
Since the story was made public, police have gone on damage control as public and media criticism has soared.
Police have released figures saying that they receive about 10 million calls per year and that around 2 million are prank calls, and that each dispatcher has to deal with hundreds of calls a night. In addition, they said that around 30% of dispatchers are youths doing their national service in the police.
On Wednesday the Judea and Samaria police sent out a statement saying that they have deployed around 1,000 police across the West Bank to man checkpoints, control traffic, and carry out forensic searches in an attempt to find any evidence that could shed light on who may have taken the teens or is holding them now. The statement quoted the District Commander Kobi Cohen as saying that "we are doing everything to bring the boys back and all of the units of the district and working day and night to find them."