Haifa mayor blocks trucks to polluting factories

Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav issued orders to close polluting factories Sunday and even blocked trucks on their way into the city, part of a new plan to fight the city’s burgeoning air pollution.

Yahav lambasted the Health Ministry last week for neglecting the port city’s pollution problem, after the ministry released a report that linked it to higher cancer rates overall in the metropolitan area and noted in particular that pollution was the cause of 50 percent of childhood cancers in Haifa.

“The Health Ministry, which basically does not exist on this front, together with the health minister, who is never seen, decided to become newspaper writers and to release statistics and opinion pieces, instead of moving their butts from the fluorescent lights in their offices into the field and doing work,” Yahav told Channel 2 on Tuesday.

The mayor came out even more strongly against the government in a press conference Sunday morning. “The government, just a few days ago, declared war on a third of the residents of the State of Israel,” Yahav said.

Yahav named the coastal cities from Hadera, south of Haifa, to Acre in the north as those most affected by industrial pollution.

Hundreds of Haifa residents protested Saturday night against the city’s dismal air quality, calling on Yahav and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “wake up.” Attorney Alice Goldman, one of the protest’s leaders, called on the government to “declare our area polluted, because we’re choking and dying, and our children are more likely to die from cancer.”

The mayor detailed the steps he is prepared to take “until the Israeli government shows it can safeguard the health of Haifa and the residents of the Krayot,” Haifa’s northern suburbs.

“As of ten minutes ago,” Yahav said Sunday morning, “the entrances to the Oil Refineries Ltd. complex and the chemical terminal of the Haifa port have been blocked by Haifa municipality trucks.”

He went on, “In conjunction, we are issuing immediate closure orders to the factories and we are filing a petition with the court to freeze all plans in the compound known as ‘Karkaot Hatzafon.'”

“This is only the beginning,” Yahav promised.

The next steps, he said, will be even more dramatic. “We are with the children, and in anything connected to their health,” Yahav said, “[we will fight] like in war. And in war, all means are kosher.”

But not everyone was impressed by the Haifa mayor’s pledge. Inbar Shaked-Daliot, a spokesperson for the environmental activism Green Course organization, responded to Yahav’s remarks. “We have been fighting Oil Refineries Ltd. for years,” she said.

“Only when the topic makes headlines does Yona Yahav respond. Where was he up until now? In a case like this, you can’t say late is better than never,” Shaked-Daliot told the Maariv newspaper.

She alleged that Yahav was taking action in such an aggressive manner in order to shift culpability from himself. “Now he is trying to remove any of his own responsibility and point an accusing finger at other people,” she said.