Nov. 24, 2016

In what could be a new and horrifying act of terrorism, wildfires raged across northern and central Israel on Thanksgiving Day.

They were brought under a semblance of control after some 80,000 people were evacuated near Haifa alone.

Officials have said some of the blazes erupted because of arson.

In a statement to the Jerusalem Post, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said generally the blazes were being brought “under control.”

This after havoc raged across the small nation over several days this week as several burning wildfires inflicted injury on dozens of people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the cause of at least some of the fires was arson. He warned the culprits would be dealt with as terrorists.

Erdan said a combination of firefighters, Homefront Command forces and police had responded to the threat.

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Agence France-Presse reported Erdan indicated about half of the fires were arson, while Education Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to blame the trouble on an Arab minority.

“Only those to whom the country does not belong are capable of burning it,” Bennett said in a tweet.

AFP reported the tweet brought a rejoinder from Ayman Odeh, the chief of the Arab coalition in parliament, who said such comments were “incitement” against Arabs.

“We have lived in this country for hundreds and thousands of years and not burned it,” he stated.

Netanyahu said authorities had noticed “encouragement to arson” on social media, but a determination of the causes was pending.

“Every fire caused by arson or incitement to arson is terror and will be treated as such,” he said.

YnetNews reported there were “countless” people “gloating over the recent rash of fire plaguing Israel over the past three days.

“They tried to ban the muezzin’s call, and Allah rained fire on them,” Hamas official Izaat al-Risheq tweeted, the report said. Israel recently has considering noise limits on the Muslim calls to prayer five times a day.

The report said some people “posted their hopes that the fires would reach strategic facilities in Israel, like the Haifa Chemicals plants, gas storage facilities across the country, and ADF bases that have large arms depots.”

Reuters reported that Arabs and Palestinians were celebrating the fires and the hashtag #Isrealisburning was appearing on Twitter.

“It’s likely that where it was arson, it goes in the direction of nationalistic,” police spokesman RoniAlsheich told reporters, without detail.

Noah Wolfson of the Meteo-Tech meteorology website did confirm that a dry period and windy conditions turned the region into a tinder box for flames, whether set by arsonists or sparked by nature.

“The extreme dryness – relative humidity below 10 percent – coupled with very strong winds, enhance and encourage any small fire to expand and be horrendous,” he told AFP.

Reuters said there had been several fires burning regionally over the past few days.

But on Thursday they intensified, fueled by unseasonably dry weather and strong easterly winds.

They were burning in the forests west of Jerusalem, near Haifa and in parts of the West Bank. Israel even had asked for help from its neighbors to fight the conflagration.

Several aircraft responded, dropping fire retardant on the worst of the flames, after Turkey, Russia, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia offered to help. The Post said Russia sent two planes and crews to fight the fires, Greece sent three planes, Italy two and Cyprus sent the only one it had.

Even Turkey, which has had limited relations with Israel since the Mavi Marmara confrontation in 2010, sent one firefighting aircraft and promised a second.

The report said local images showed a “wall of flames raging through central neighborhoods of Israel’s largest city.”

“A thick haze of smoke hung over Haifa, which rises up from the Mediterranean Sea overlooking a large port. Schools and universities were evacuated, and two nearby prisons transferred inmates to other jails, a prisons service spokesman said,” Reuters reported.

Patients also were moved away from hospitals in the region, and Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, told AFP that residents in eight neighborhoods in Haifa were evacuated due to six different fires, one of which was burning “from one house to the other,” according to a rescue services official.

“Sometimes we are taking residents out against their will,” said Naftali Rottenberg on public radio.

AFP reported Haifa resident Yael Hame described it as worse than the 2010 wildfires that killed 44.

“The fire was up over the skyscrapers. It came up to 20 stories high,” she told the agency.

AFP said hundreds of homes were damaged and some destroyed. But no deaths were reported.

The major highway route between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was temporarily closed as flames approached Modi’in.

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URL to article: http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/raging-wind-whipped-arson-flames-threaten-israel/