Government accused of failing to take fire threat seriously despite years of warnings

On December 20, 2010, two weeks after 44 people were killed in a massive fire in the Carmel Forest near Haifa, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blocked the establishment of a state commission of inquiry. Instead, the Knesset State Control Committee opted for a state comptroller’s report, whose findings and finger-pointing would be much easier to ignore.

In 2012, comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss issued his report, highlighting a staggering number of omissions and failures, particularly in the operation of the police command and control systems, as well as a shortfall in manpower and equipment.  The number of firefighters and firetrucks in Israel at the time was a quarter of that in developed countries of similar size, and storerooms held only one-tenth of the fire retardant material they were supposed to have.

Some lessons were learned after the 80-hour fire, which saw 50,000 dunams (12,350 acres) of woodland and five million trees go up in flames, as well as hundreds of houses burn to the ground. One change was that responsibility for fire stations moved from individual local authorities to a national fire department with a clear chain of command. Another was creating an aerial firefighting squadron.

But the changes have been insufficient to significantly extinguish the fire risk in Israel, with waves of major blazes breaking out nationwide in 2016 and in the Jerusalem area in 2021 and again this week, taking lives and homes, forcing communities to evacuate and destroying dunam after dunam of woodland. In each case, experts and officials pointed to a lack of preparedness and warnings that went unheeded by those in charge.

Experts say wildfires are encouraged by an abundance of dry vegetation and strong winds, and are usually sparked by negligence or arson, with lightning strikes rare in the dry summer months.

As climate changes take hold and periods of intense heat and dryness become longer and more frequent, along with extreme rain events that support the growth of wild brush, the hazard is only expected to grow.

‘Decision-makers reacted with indifference’

On Wednesday, as firefighters struggled to contain blazes tearing through the hills surrounding Jerusalem, Dov Ganem, chairman of the Israel Fire and Air Rescue Association, told the Walla news site that he had been warning for 18 years about the state’s lack of preparedness for massive fires.

Ganem said he had long pushed for advanced aerial firefighting, but that decision-makers had reacted with indifference.

In January, as wildfires wreaked havoc in Southern California, Itzik Oz, the Fire and Rescue Authority’s Southern District commander, told The Times of Israel that a Los Angeles-type conflagration in Israel was not out of the question.

But fire officials noted that Israel lacked the manpower to handle a blaze on that scale. While the global norm is one career firefighter for every 1,000 residents, Israeli fire teams could only employ one firefighter for every 4,500.

“We are stretched from end to end,” Fire and Rescue Authority spokeswoman Tal Volvovitch said at the time.

In July 2023, a report by the Knesset Research and Information Center highlighted the gaps between what various professional scenarios required and what was available. It found there were 123 fire stations, when 150 were needed, and 2,400 firefighter positions, when 3,366 were required, a gap of 29%. The service had access to 14 firefighting planes, six police helicopters, 41 drones, and two Air Force transport planes, the report said — numbers determined not by need but by available budgets, according to the National Fire and Rescue Authority.

Instead of bolstering the fire service, the government cut its funding by NIS 217 million ($60 million) in March as part of the state budget.

It has also blocked the planned purchase of Blackhawk helicopters aimed at bolstering the firefighters’ aerial forces, according to Tomer Lotan, a former director of what was then called the Public Security Ministry under the government of prime minister Naftali Bennett.

Writing on X on Wednesday, Lotan said he had headed up a project, approved by Bennett, to buy the choppers as part of a national plan for dealing with forest, woodland, and open-space fires that had been approved by the government in February 2022.

But the purchase was suspended by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir after he took control of the ministry and renamed it. According to Lotan, Ben Gvir claimed falsely that the helicopters were intended to be used by the police commissioner.

“I tried my best to explain that these were firefighting helicopters that were supposed to upgrade Israel’s air capabilities,” wrote Lotan. “Of course, it was like talking to a wall. The false arguments have stalled the Blackhawks project – and prevented us from being here today, two and a half years later, with a vital boost to the fight against the giant fires.”

I’m “watching the pictures of the raging fire and my blood is boiling!” he wrote.

Following the Los Angeles fires, opposition lawmakers, led by Yorai Lahav-Hertzano (Yesh Atid), called in February for an urgent discussion in the National Security Committee.

Only on Wednesday, as the fires raged outside Jerusalem, was he informed that such a meeting had now been scheduled — for May 6.

In March, the President’s Climate Forum, led by former lawmaker Dov Khenin, called on the prime minister to hold an emergency discussion on preparing for the dangers of drought and extreme climate events ahead of the summer.

Despite reminders, the call went unanswered.

The Fire and Rescue Authority itself came under scathing criticism from the State Comptroller in July 2024, in the context of warnings about a potential fire catastrophe. Matanyahu Englman found the authority had investigated only about 9% of the fires it handled in 2022 and 14% of those it dealt with in 2023. More than 50% of the files it opened between 2020 and 2022 were still open after a year.

The audit found that the authority operated without written, approved policy documents on how to conduct fire investigations. It also found that the existing policy was based neither on documented risk analysis nor optimal management practices.

The report found that 75% of files opened by police on suspicion of arson offenses between 2019 and 2022 were closed without indictments. During these years, 228 files were opened on suspicion of terror arson, but indictments were only filed in a third of them.

Englman warned, “The minister of national security and the Fire Department must provide appropriate solutions to the danger of fires. Protecting Israeli citizens from fires is the government’s highest duty.”

‘We need a change of culture’

Though firefighters were still struggling to get the fires under control as of Thursday, there have been few serious injuries compared with other fires on this scale and few scenes of panicked evacuations of old-age homes or other shared residences.

At least 18 people were admitted to Kaplan Medical Center and Shamir Medical Center, mostly due to smoke inhalation and burns. These included two pregnant women and two infants.

Another 10 people were treated by paramedics but did not require hospitalization. The Fire and Rescue Service said 12 firefighters had sustained light injuries while battling the flames.

Claiming that a lot of equipment had been added to the fire and rescue services over recent years, former fire and rescue authority commissioner Dedi Simchi told Channel 12 news on Wednesday evening that the main problems were fire prevention and a lack of a safety culture.

Property owners, he said, needed to take more responsibility for the vegetation around their homes.

Each year, the KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority prepare for the official start of the fire season on May 1 by creating and maintaining vegetation-free buffer zones and clearing underbrush and other overgrown flora.

But local authorities and individual communities need to keep their own backyards in order, too, officials say.

Three years ago, fires burned through some 11,000 dunams (2,720 acres) of forest outside Jerusalem over 52 hours, in what was suspected, but never proven, to be the result of arson. Over 2,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and several houses were destroyed, though populated areas were largely spared.

Two years ago, Jerusalem District Fire and Rescue Service head Eyal Cohen said most communities in the Mateh Yehuda region, where most of this week’s fires raged, had not been following instructions issued by fire and rescue authorities to clear vegetation and that the forest around them was “an explosive device.”

At that time, a spokesman for the Mateh Yehuda Regional Council told The Times of Israel that the council was not empowered to carry out the work within communities and that land bordering them was managed not by the council but by other bodies, such as KKL-JNF and the Parks Authority.

A 2017 government report recommended establishing a single supervisory body to oversee a coordinated nationwide effort to implement prevention measures in all of Israel’s forests, irrespective of who owns or manages them.

A source in the fire and rescue authority told The Times of Israel on Wednesday night that a national fire forum, with representatives from multiple bodies, had been created under the leadership of Fire and Rescue Commissioner Eyal Caspi to ensure a better-coordinated approach.