Haifa residents kept from homes as recovery process begins

With some 700 homes damaged in Haifa fires Thursday, residents there, while not yet allowed to return home, are beginning the process of picking up the pieces.

Some 60,000 have yet to return to their homes as police forces and firefighting units were still heavily deployed in the Haifa area for fear that the fire could be reignited due to the rare dry, windy weather.

A senior police official tells the Ynet news site several people were caught looting homes that had been evacuated overnight.

“Right now the effort is to return as many people as possible back to their normal lives before the weekend,” the official says. “To make sure as many as possible can return home and so that those who can’t will receive aid from welfare and city officials.”

Israeli radio and TV reports are packed with interviews with people describing the fires that damaged their homes, what they lost and what they managed to save.

“I rushed home and saved the album with pictures of my parents, that was the only important thing for me,” one Haifa resident tells Ynet. “There’s damage, not a lot, but I’m still crying. … It’s sad to see the damage but we are strong.”

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon tells the Walla news site that those affected will be put up in hotels on the government’s dime and be given immediate aid, before they begin the process of assessing damage and handing out compensation, saying that they likely fall in the same category as terror victims.

“We agreed with the Tax Authority to open a special hotline for anyone affected, who will say what they need, where they live, and we will send an assessor,” he says. “There will be time to calculate [damages] — now we need to give immediate assistance to residents. The state will take responsibility for any nationalistic or terror attack and unfortunately, it seems this is going in that direction.”

The country’s leaders have raised the possibility that Arab assailants had intentionally set the blazes. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Palestinian incitement for fueling those attacks.

Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich established a special investigative unit on Thursday to determine the cause of the fires and help locate arsonists. Earlier Thursday, he acknowledged arson “in some cases… presumably out of nationalistic motives.”

— AP contributed