The Agriculture Ministry said locusts, a danger to agricultural crops, had been found Monday in agricultural villages in the center of the southeastern Arava region.
A team from the Plant Protection and Inspection Services division of the ministry was sent to the area to assess the situation and determine what measures were needed to kill the voracious members of the grasshopper family that can destroy fields of crops.
The locusts appeared to have crossed the border from Jordan into the desert area south of the Dead Sea that is dotted with Israeli villages.
A ministry statement said pesticides used to kill locusts are environmentally friendly and that swarms of locusts pose no danger to humans or animals.
Aircraft spraying pesticides at the fields in Ramat Hanegev March 11 2013. as swarms of locusts invaded the south of Israel. (Flash90)
In February the ministry tracked swarms of locusts on the Egyptian side of the border in concert with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), but those pests did not penetrate Israeli airspace.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Editionby email and never miss our top stories
The last time swarms of locusts infested Israeli croplands was in 2013, when the Agriculture Ministry waged a three-week campaign using crop-dusting planes to bombard the bugs with pesticides.
Discover Israel's most beloved poet
She died more than four decades ago, but Leah Goldberg remains a magnetic and enigmatic figure: Israel’s most beloved poet, a powerful woman who lived with her mother and never married, who reinvented herself from the ashes of World War I through her magical writing.
You can screen 'The Five Houses of Leah Goldberg' June 4-11. Join The Times of Israel Community today to support our work and watch this and other outstanding documentary films in our DocuNation series.
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
