Air Supply gives free tix to Israeli firefighters’ wives

After postponing a concert in Haifa last week due to massive fires there, the band Air Supply gave away 200 tickets to the wives of Israeli firefighters.

The concert was rescheduled for Sunday after being canceled on Friday.

“This is a gesture to wives of firefighters, who went through incredibly difficult days and nights,” concert producer Dudi Berkowitz said, according to Ynet. “We decided to give them an evening away from it all with some good music. I invite firemen’s wives to come enjoy with us.”

Air Supply performed before thousands of fans last week in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The soft rock band is playing Israel for the fourth time in eight years.

The battle to push back the flames marked among the most difficult operations ever undertaken by Israel’s firefighters. Some 2,000 firefighters battled the fires, many of them working in grueling 24-hour shifts alongside 450 soldiers from the Home Front Command and 69 Cypriot firefighters.

Fourteen planes from Israel’s firefighting squadron, aided by at least 15 additional planes supplied by ten other nations, carried out some 480 sorties. A US supertanker was pressed into service soon after it arrived Saturday, flying sorties over Nataf in the Jerusalem hills to ensure no recurrence of the blazes there, though some fire officials said it was not needed. The Palestinian Authority sent fire crews to help.

The Nature and Parks Authority said over 30,000 dunams (7,400 acres) of protected park areas were burned, including 2,800 dunams (700 acres) in Haifa, the worst hit major city, alone.

In all, as much as 130,000 dunams (32,000 acres) of natural forests and brush were destroyed, about 30 percent more than the territory affected by the Carmel Forest fire of 2010. A great deal of the Judean Hills National Park and the Kfir Nature Reserve were burned.