Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.
Residents of central Israel on Saturday reported the arrival of locusts in the major cities of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Rishon Lezion, Petah Tikva, and as far north as the coastal city of Netanya.
The Nature and Parks Authority urged calm and said that the insects that had reached the country’s population center were the last remnants of the swarm that entered the country from Egypt days before. The authority added that the remaining groups of locusts will be scattered by the wind and pose no threat to the area.
As residents of central Israel took to social media to document the arrival of the insects, one resident of Modi’in, a city situated between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, tweeted a photo of a locust that landed in his garden.
A locust lands in Modi’in in central Israel on Saturday. (photo credit: Tom Einhorn, Twitter)
Another swarm of locusts of an unspecified size reportedly entered southern Israel Saturday afternoon, but because the area in which they were found has no agriculture, they will be sprayed with pesticides on Sunday.
The Agriculture Ministry said that areas of southern Israel adjacent to the Egyptian border were sprayed with pesticides earlier in the day.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Editionby email and never miss our top stories
The plagues of destructive insects first arrived in Israel earlier this week after flying over the border from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The first swarm caused an estimated hundreds of thousands of shekels in damage to Israeli crops.
We can't do this work alone.
The war with Iran has been draining for all of us in Israel. But when I heard about a high casualty incident – ballistic missile impacts in Arad and Dimona that left nearly 200 people wounded – I drank a cup of coffee, packed a bag, and headed south.
There, I spoke with Shilgit, the head of an after-school program for underprivileged youth. Standing outside her destroyed center, Shilgit said it was a miracle that no children were hurt and spoke about the community coming together in the hours since.
As a Times of Israel reporter, I’m committed to telling stories of resilience like Shilgit’s. But my colleagues and I can't do this alone. If you value work like this,please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. Your financial support is essential to keep real human reporting like this going.
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
