RHODES, Greece: Authorities evacuated nearly 2,500 people from the Greek island of Corfu on Monday as the prime minister warned that the heat-battered nation was “at war” with several wildfires and spoke of three difficult days ahead.
Tens of thousands of people have already fled blazes on the island of Rhodes, with many frightened tourists scrambling to get home on evacuation flights.
About 2,400 visitors and locals were evacuated from the Ionian tourist island of Corfu from Sunday into Monday, a fire service spokesman said, adding that the departures were a precaution.
Fires were also burning on Greece’s second largest island of Evia on Monday.
“We are at war and are exclusively geared toward the fire front,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament, warning that the nation faced “another three difficult days ahead” before high temperatures are forecast to ease.
Vassilis Kikilias, Greece’s civil protection minister, said crews had battled over 500 fires around the country for 12 straight days.
Greece has been sweltering under a lengthy spell of extreme heat that has exacerbated wildfire risk and left visitors stranded in peak tourist season.
The government’s speedy evacuation came after a tragedy in 2018 when over 100 people perished in Greece’s deadliest forest fire at Mati, near Athens, which Mitsotakis on Monday said still “haunts us all.”
Because of the wildfires, an annual celebration on Monday to mark the 1974 restoration of democracy in Greece was canceled.
Rhodes, which counted 2.5 million visitor arrivals in 2022, is one of Greece’s leading holiday destinations.
Travel giant TUI on Monday said it was suspending holiday packages to Rhodes until Friday.
Greek television broadcast images of long lines of people, some in beachwear, lugging suitcases along the island’s roads on Saturday, when the evacuations were ordered.
“We walked for about six hours in the heat,” Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the United Kingdom, told AFP at Rhodes airport.
Some 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country’s largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
Police said 16,000 people had been transported on land and 3,000 evacuated by sea. Others had to flee by road or used their own transport after being told to leave the area.
“We are exhausted and traumatized,” said Daniel-Cladin Schmidt, a 42-year-old German tourist waiting to be evacuated with his wife and nine-year-old son.
“There were thousands of people, the buses couldn’t pass, we had to walk for more than two hours,” he told AFP at the airport.
“We couldn’t breathe, we just covered our faces and moved forward.”
Holiday-makers and some locals spent the night in gyms, schools and hotel conference centers on the island.
In the departures hall of the international airport, AFP saw groups of tourists sleeping on the floor, surrounded by luggage.
“We had to lend a woman some of my wife’s clothes because she had nothing to wear,” Kevin Sales, an engineer from England, told AFP. “It was terrible.”
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, and have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
“We ran 10 kilometers (six miles) with all our luggage to escape the flames,” while the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit), said German tourist Lena Schwarz, after arriving at Hanover airport overnight Sunday into Monday.
The 38-year-old told AFP their journey leaving Rhodes was “hell on Earth.”
Oxana Neb, 50, also arriving at Hanover, said the evacuation had been “very bad.”
“We stayed in the hotel until the end and fire came from all sides,” she said.
She joined other guests running to the beach, eventually abandoning her suitcases on the way, she said.
Like every summer, Greece is plagued by forest fires, often deadly, ravaging tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation.
This summer, Greece experienced one of the longest heatwaves in recent years, according to experts, with the thermometer hitting 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend.
Temperatures eased Monday but were expected to to pick up again on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Rhodes on Tuesday remains at the highest level of fire alert, alongside Crete.
Thousands more evacuated as Greece ‘at war’ with forest fires
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Thousands more evacuated as Greece ‘at war’ with forest fires
- About 2,400 visitors and locals were evacuated from the Ionian tourist island of Corfu from Sunday into Monday
- Speedy evacuation comes after a tragedy in 2018 when over 100 people perished in Greece’s deadliest forest fire at Mati, near Athens
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
