Russia, Turkey and Cyprus send firefighting planes to Israel as hundreds of homes damaged in worst wildfires since 2010

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

France, 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.

Forest fires in Israel – in pictures Read more

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 Palestinian Authority, which sent firefighters in 2010, has also offered to join the international effort to extinguish the blazes.

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.

The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said if proof was discovered that any of the fires were deliberately sparked they would be treated as acts of “terror”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People drive past a fire in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

“Every fire caused by arson or incitement to arson is terror and will be treated as such accordingly,” he told reporters in Haifa near the scene of the fires.

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.

Bennett provided no evidence to support his claims.

