Dozens of parents of students of an Eshkol Regional Council school became outraged on Sunday after footage surfaced online showing a bus in which their children were riding going against the direction of traffic after the driver decided to take a risky maneuver to overtake several vehicles ahead.
The incident took place on Thursday on a road close to Tzohar, a small town near the Gaza Strip border. A driver driving behind the bus caught the incident on his dashcam.
In the footage, the bus driver is seen veering off into the parallel lane in what looked like an illegal maneuver to pass a truck and a private car driving relatively slowly.
The documentation reached the Eshkol Regional Council, which immediately filed a report with Israel Police's National Traffic Department.
The police located the driver, a 71-year-old resident of the small agricultural community of Moshav Yesha, and summoned him for questioning. He claimed that he saw a tractor driving slowly ahead, and assumed he was allowed to pass because the solid white line on the road (which signals that passing is prohibited) looked orange, leading him to believe that there was construction work on the road.
However, the video shows that the driver passed a truck and a private car, and not a tractor as claimed.
National Traffic Department officials stressed that even if the road was completely clear, the driver was strictly prohibited from crossing over to the other lane in order to pass any vehicle because of the solid white line.