Israel unequipped to combat LA-style wildfire, officials warn
Country’s firefighters are ‘stretched from end to end’ amid ongoing war as officials worry that California blazes could be replicated in the warming Mediterranean region

As wildfires continue to wreak havoc in southern California, Israeli officials are sounding alarm bells about the possibility of similarly destructive blazes striking the Middle East.
The conflagrations engulfing Los Angeles and its surroundings have so far claimed dozens of lives and leveled entire neighborhoods. Underlying the catastrophe is a dangerous fusion of hot, arid weather and powerful gusts of wind up to 100 miles an hour (160 km/h).
With temperatures on the steep rise in the eastern Mediterranean, officials in the Fire and Rescue Authority told The Times of Israel that an outbreak on the scale of Los Angeles is not out of the question.
“It will come to Israel, there is no helping it,” said Itzik Oz, the authority’s Southern District commander, earlier this week.
But despite the looming threat, Israeli firefighting forces are woefully underequipped to deal with such an event.
According to the Fire and Rescue Authority, manpower falls far below the firefighter-to-resident ratio set by the OECD. While the global norm stands at one career firefighter per every 1,000 residents, Israeli fire teams are only able to employ one firefighter for every 4,500.
“We are stretched from end to end,” said Fire and Rescue Authority spokeswoman Tal Volvovitch.
This past summer, missiles launched by Hezbollah toward towns on the northern border heaped even more pressure on Israel’s embattled fire protection services. Over 220,000 dunams (54,000 acres) in the north went up in flames, costing over NIS 3 billion ($828 million).
The conflict with Hezbollah has exacerbated the issue, but Oz and others in fire protection maintain that climate change is the driving force behind the uptick in wildfires.
“It’s important to understand that the respective climates of California and Israel are very similar,” noted Asaf Karavani, the director of the KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund’s Israeli Forest Service.
Although located halfway across the world, California has a “Mediterranean” climate, characterized by rainy winters and hot, dry summers. The arid summer weather is what makes the West Coast state — and the Mediterranean basin — especially prone to recurring wildfires.
But as Earth’s atmosphere warms and as the summer season stretches later into the year, increasingly destructive blazes have begun to persist year-round.
“There’s a reason why we’re seeing these California fires in January, in the middle of winter,” Karavani said. When the dry summer weather endures into the autumn months, vegetation remains without moisture, and is thus susceptible to catching fire.

In July last year, the Israeli Meteorological Service published a report based on current climate trends predicting a significant dip in both the amount of rain and the number of rainy days in the decades to come.
In light of last summer’s sweeping wildfires, the Fire and Rescue Authority stepped up recruitment efforts last year.
“We are now in the process of recruiting firefighters but this isn’t enough, we still need many more,” Oz said. The agency currently employs 2,165 career firefighters who work alongside some 3,000 volunteers.
This past year, the Fire and Rescue Authority enlisted 300 new recruits to the force, doubling their usual annual number of 150. The recruits have yet to undergo training. Around 150 firefighters leave or retire from service each year.
“We recruited quite a few firefighters to the department but of course, this still doesn’t meet the global standard. I’m a little bit cautious of saying these things but if we want to prepare ourselves, we want to recruit more firefighters,” Oz said.
On top of their limited manpower, Israel’s fire protection services are lacking in up-to-date technology. According to district fire commissioners, this is largely a budgeting issue.
“It could be that if we had a broader budget, we would be able to measure up better. Right now we are doing the maximum with what we have,” said Oz.
“We’re trying to expand the department and are currently in the process of getting a tender for another 12 firefighting planes to add to the 14 planes we already have,” he continued.

Representatives from the fire protection service made their case to the Knesset’s National Security Committee in October, seeking more funding to meet the growing threat spurred by climate change.
The meeting brought to light a litany of deficits in both the department’s manpower and technology at its disposal.
Northern District commander Yair Elkayam lamented to the committee that his district had only 115 firefighters on hand this past summer.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Israel’s fire engines are over two decades old.
The Fire and Rescue Authority’s budget was upped to NIS 1.616 billion ($446 million) in 2025, an increase from last year’s NIS 1.55 billion ($428 million). Most of the money will go to firefighters’ salaries, while some NIS 300 million will be spent on procurement of new fire engines, aircraft and other technology.
Oz noted that the government defined the climate crisis as a threat to national security a few years ago, which in turn granted Fire and Rescue Authority the nominal status of a security organization.
“Climate change is already here. We’ve witnessed it over the past few years, in the winter and summer months. It is our big challenge as a country,” he said.