Arson suspected as Jerusalem blaze halts trains

A wildfire broke out in southwestern Jerusalem Sunday, halting train traffic and raising suspicions that it may have been set intentionally.

The fire began adjacent to the Ein Yael Living Museum, which lies in the Refa’im Valley, south of the Malha neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Firefighters and two planes managed to prevent the flames from reaching the Biblical Zoo.

The fire was the latest in a series of blazes that have consumed hundreds of dunams of land around the capital, leading to suspicions that some may have been set intentionally.

An initial investigation into the Sunday fire found that the blaze was likely the result of arson originating in the nearby Palestinian town of Battir.

Palestinian arsonists were also suspected in the wave of fires that burned more than a thousand dunams (247 acres) of Jerusalem forest in three separate incidents last week.

“On Sunday, it was 105 dunams, on Thursday it was 850, and today another 40 dunams went up in smoke,” Reuven Yitzhak, the commander of the Beit Shemesh fire department told Hebrew-language news site Ynet on Saturday. “Our firefighters are exhausted,” he said.

Authorities discovered the remains of a number of Molotov cocktails at a site west of Jerusalem where a large blaze started Saturday.

The incendiary weapons were found adjacent to the security fence separating the small Palestinian village of Bidu from the Israeli kibbutz of Ma’ale Hahamisha and the nearby Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar.