ISIS Behind Fires Ravaging Israel

Moshav Mevo Modi'im, where 40 out 50 houses were damaged by fire

“Pyro-terrorism is a weapon Israel’s enemies used since the end of 2016 when the first wave of huge fires rocked the Jewish state destroying most of the Carmel Forest near Haifa. The new trend continued when Hamas started the ‘Great March of Return’ in March 2018 and introduced the incendiary balloons and kites which were used to terrorize Israel’s southern regions. The latest wave of blazes which plagued the Jewish state in May and destroyed the Jewish village Mevo Modiin and has now spread to Samaria and Judea was for a large part the work of arsonists as well. The fire in Mevo Modiin left 50 families without a home and possessions, while police and the Israeli fire brigade later determined the blaze was caused by arson. Arson-terrorism has now also reached Samaria and Judea. A huge blaze in the Jewish village of Carmei Tzur in central Judea which raged on Wednesday last week and reached the outskirts of the embattled community, started after Palestinian Arab arsonists threw firebombs across the security fence, a member of the local security team told this reporter. The source said that Palestinian Arabs routinely throw firebombs across the fence near the Hamas hotbed Beit Umar, but this time they targeted the southwestern part of Carmei Tzur where there is no fence and where most people live in caravans. The huge blaze in Carmei Tzur coincided with a large fire near the Jewish village of Itamar in central Samaria. Residents of Itamar claimed that the fire was the fourth attempt in as many days to destroy their community. ‘This is the fourth fire to break out in four days, endangering residents and families, destroying years’ worth of work by farmers. The heart breaks,’ Iyar Segal a resident of Itamar told Israeli media. The media largely ignored these fires while the major news outlets in Israel blamed the wave of fires on the unprecedented heat wave which hit the Jewish state in May. Only the state-funded broadcaster KAN reported about the real reason for the wave of fires. KAN said, ‘hundreds of the fires in the last weeks in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh area were a result of arson.’ The terror watchdog group Boomerang, furthermore, released a new video documenting the number of fires that firefighters fought since November 2016: a whopping 1,773 (Gaza-belt not included). Firefighter Ron Shlaf, who was a prominent member of the team that investigated the wave of fires, said that there’s no doubt about what caused the bulk of the blazes. ‘Yes. We’ve faced arson terror. There is no dilemma or doubt about it. All the villages that were burned were Jewish and all those arrested or prosecuted were Arabs. And from a thorough investigation we conducted, no one else in the Middle East—including the Palestinians—experienced such an extreme wave of fires like we experienced,’ Shlaf told Boomerang. Shlaf's team investigated 80 large fires since 2016 and came to the conclusion that 71 of them were the work of arson terrorists.”

​“ISIS Behind Fires Ravaging Israel,” Israel Today, June 11, 2019

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