Two laborers were killed Sunday morning and four others were injured, three of them moderately, at a construction site on Ha-Shichrur Street in Tirat Hacarmel in northern Israel after a container that was apparently being used as an elevator became detached from its moorings and collapsed on them from the twelfth story of the building they were working on.

The two laborers were later named as Hassan Watted and Diab Watted.

Yehudit Simantov was an eye-witness to the disaster and later related what she saw.

"This morning, like any other morning, I went out to drink a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette in the corner of my garden, where there's a table and chairs," she described. "There's a fence near the path that separates my building and the building they were working on, and the container was near me too, very near in fact. I can't tell you exactly how it happened but what I do know is that as I was sitting there talking to my daughter [on the phone], I said to her, 'Rotem, I can hear weird noises, wow - I think something's about to happen, everything's shaking...'"

Simantov described how "the whole place is a disaster site, it seems like half of the building just fell into my garden, and it was so close to me, just a meter and a half away and things were flying through the air, ceramic tiles came off the wall and fell on the chair where I was sitting just seconds before... If I hadn't gotten up just a few seconds before it would have been a tragedy."

She added that to the best of her knowledge, the construction company, Amram Avraham, has yet to officially respond to the incident.

"I only managed to get three steps away when I heard a 'boom,'" Simantov continued. "There were shards flying everywhere and at first I didn't realize how serious it was, I was in shock. I started to tremble and I ran into the house and screamed to my husband, 'Come out here so that the elevator doesn't fall onto you,' because I still didn't realize what had fallen - I hadn't seen it happen. A few minutes later, we went outside together and it was only then that I realized what a narrow escape I'd had. Underneath the chair where I'd been sitting there were tefillin, and for some reason I didn't pick them up - they'd been there a few days and they weren't bothering me there."

Work at the construction site has now stopped. "They're not working there now, and the police have been there and Lahav 433 [an anti-corruption unit] too, with investigators, and they went into my garden and asked me all sorts of questions. It's still a disaster scene out here."