50,000 Haifa residents evacuated as wildfires claim homes, businesses

Russia, Turkey and Cyprus are to send firefighting planes to Israel as the country battles fierce forest fires that have triggered the evacuation of tens of thousands of people, including 11 neighbourhoods in Haifa.

Strengthening east winds on top of warm, dry weather have helped spread the blazes in several areas of the country for a third day, including outside Jerusalem, where fires temporarily closed the main motorway linking the city to Tel Aviv.

Haifa, however, was the worst affected, with fires starting out in the north-east of the port city near Paz Bridge and spreading to near the city’s football stadium. About 50,000 people have been evacuated from the city as a precaution.

Haifa’s civilian airport was closed on Thursday, while local media reported plans to evacuate prisons.

“We evacuated three neighbourhoods and there are people who are stuck,” a fire department spokesman, Kayed Daher, said of the situation in Haifa earlier in the day. “The fire is still burning and the flames are approaching a gas [petrol] station.”

The fires are the worst since 2010, when Israel suffered its single deadliest wildfire; it killed 42 people and was extinguished only after firefighting aircraft from as far away as the US were dispatched to bring it under control.

The fires started on Monday in Neve Shalom, outside Jerusalem, before spreading. Hundreds of homes have been damaged and a dozen people treated for smoke inhalation.

Despite claims by Israel’s security minister, Gilad Erdan, that 50% of the fires were “apparently arson”, the Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said investigators had not yet been able to determine whether any of the dozens of fires countrywide had been set deliberately.

Israel’s police chief, Roni Alsheich, told reporters that arsonists were suspected of setting some of the fires for political reasons. “It’s safe to assume that whoever is setting the fires isn’t doing it only out of pyromania,” he said. “If it is arson, it is politically motivated.”

Naftali Bennett, the leader of the far-right, pro-settler Jewish Home party, suggested on Twitter that arsonists were disloyal to the state, and that those who set the fires could not be Jewish.

“Only those to whom the country does not belong are capable of burning it,” he said in a tweet in Hebrew, but provided no evidence to support his claims.