KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel: Israeli authorities were on alert for new brush fires on Tuesday, after munitions fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah the previous evening ignited several blazes across northern Israel.
The Israel Fire and Rescue Service said dozens of firefighting teams worked through the night with teams from the Nature and Park Service, army, police and other agencies before the largest fires were brought under control in the morning, an AFP journalist reported.
“As of this time there are three active sites” near the border with Lebanon, the fire service posted on X earlier Tuesday. An AFP journalist said firefighters were still working to extinguish smaller fires.
The flames encroached on Kiryat Shmona, a town near the Lebanese border that has been largely evacuated in the face of near-daily exchanges of fire between the army and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered war in the Gaza Strip.
Extreme heat that has gripped the region in recent days had already raised the risk of brush fires, made worse by daily barrages of rockets and drone strikes that have rained down incendiary material.
An AFP photographer in the northern town saw fierce fires engulfing parts of the border area.
On Sunday, a brush fire in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights burned around 10 square kilometers (nearly four square miles) of land after a rocket fired from Lebanon struck near the town of Katzrin.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) also reported fires in Alma Al-Shaab and Dhayra, two villages near the border with Israel. It said the fires were caused by “Israeli phosphorus incendiary shells.”
The Israeli army said it had deployed reinforcements to support firefighters overwhelmed by the scale of the blazes.
“Six... reservist soldiers were lightly injured as a result of smoke inhalation and transferred to a hospital to receive medical treatment,” the army said.
“The forces gained control over the locations of fire, and at this stage, no human life is at risk,” it added.
Officers of the army’s Northern Command had arrived in Kiryat Shmona during the night and the army was “conducting a situational assessment” in the sector.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said it was closely monitoring the fires.
Government spokesman David Mencer said that attacks by Hezbollah “have caused significant fires.”
In some areas of northern Israel firefighters had been battling “fire for almost 24 hours in extreme weather conditions while striving to reach out and save lives, and prevent damage to property,” Mencer told journalists.
“This is not a sustainable reality.”
In retaliation, Israel’s military announced it had carried out air strikes against what it said were Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s NNA reported that Israeli incendiary shells had sparked a forest fire that was approaching houses in the southern village of Alma Al-Shaab on Tuesday.
Brush fires sparked by rockets from Lebanon blaze in north Israel
https://arab.news/ydr56
Brush fires sparked by rockets from Lebanon blaze in north Israel
- Extreme heat that has gripped the region in recent days had already raised the risk of brush fires
- The Israeli army said it had deployed reinforcements to support firefighters overwhelmed by the scale of the blazes
Iraq’s dreams of wheat independence dashed by water crisis
- Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk
- Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000
NAJAF: Iraqi wheat farmer Ma’an Al-Fatlawi has long depended on the nearby Euphrates River to feed his fields near the city of Najaf. But this year, those waters, which made the Fertile Crescent a cradle of ancient civilization 10,000 years ago, are drying up, and he sees few options.
“Drilling wells is not successful in our land, because the water is saline,” Al-Fatlawi said, as he stood by an irrigation canal near his parched fields awaiting the release of his allotted water supply.
A push by Iraq — historically among the Middle East’s biggest wheat importers — to guarantee food security by ensuring wheat production covers the country’s needs has led to three successive annual surpluses of the staple grain.
But those hard-won advances are now under threat as the driest year in modern history and record-low water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have reduced planting and could slash the harvest by up to 50 percent this season.
“Iraq is facing one of the most severe droughts that has been observed in decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Iraq representative Salah El Hajj Hassan told Reuters.
VULNERABLE TO NATURE AND NEIGHBOURS
The crisis is laying bare Iraq’s vulnerability.
A largely desert nation, Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk, according to the UN’s Global Environment Outlook. Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000 and could climb by up to 5.6 C by the end of the century compared to the period before industrialization, according to the International Energy Agency. Rainfall is projected to decline.
But Iraq is also at the mercy of its neighbors for 70 percent of its water supply. And Turkiye and Iran have been using upstream dams to take a greater share of the region’s shared resource.
The FAO says the diminishing amount of water that has trickled down to Iraq is the biggest factor behind the current crisis, which has forced Baghdad to introduce rationing.
Iraq’s water reserves have plunged from 60 billion cubic meters in 2020 to less than 4 billion today, said El Hajj Hassan, who expects wheat production this season to drop by 30 percent to 50 percent.
“Rain-fed and irrigated agriculture are directly affected nationwide,” he said.
EFFORTS TO END IMPORT DEPENDENCE UNDER THREAT
To wean the country off its dependence on imports, Iraq’s government has in recent years paid for high-yield seeds and inputs, promoted modern irrigation and desert farming to expand cultivation, and subsidised grain purchases to offer farmers more than double global wheat prices.
It is a plan that, though expensive, has boosted strategic wheat reserves to over 6 million metric tons in some seasons, overwhelming Iraq’s silo capacity. The government, which purchased around 5.1 million tons of the 2025 harvest, said in September that those reserves could meet up to a year of demand.
Others, however, including Harry Istepanian — a water expert and founder of Iraq Climate Change Center — now expect imports to rise again, putting the country at greater risk of higher food prices with knock-on effects for trade and government budgets.
“Iraq’s water and food security crisis is no longer just an environmental problem; it has immediate economic and security spillovers,” Istepanian told Reuters.
A preliminary FAO forecast anticipates wheat import needs for the 2025/26 marketing year to increase to about 2.4 million tons.
Global wheat markets are currently oversupplied, offering cheaper options, but Iraq could once again face price volatility.
Iraq’s trade ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the likelihood of increased imports.
In response to the crisis, the ministry of agriculture capped river-irrigated wheat at 1 million dunams in the 2025/26 season — half last season’s level — and mandated modern irrigation techniques including drip and sprinkler systems to replace flood irrigation through open canals, which loses water through evaporation and seepage.
A dunam is a measurement of area roughly equivalent to a quarter acre.
The ministry is allocating 3.5 million dunams in desert areas using groundwater. That too is contingent on the use of modern irrigation.
“The plan was implemented in two phases,” said Mahdi Dhamad Al-Qaisi, an adviser to the agriculture minister. “Both require modern irrigation.”
Rice cultivation, meanwhile, which is far more water-intensive than wheat, was banned nationwide.
RURAL LIVELIHOODS AT RISK
One ton of wheat production in Iraq requires about 1,100 cubic meters of water, said Ammar Abdul-Khaliq, head of the Wells and Groundwater Authority in southern Iraq. Pivoting to more dependence on wells to replace river water is risky.
“If water extraction continues without scientific study, groundwater reserves will decline,” he said.
Basra aquifers, he said, have already fallen by three to five meters.
Groundwater irrigation systems are also expensive due to the required infrastructure like sprinklers and concrete basins. That presents a further economic challenge to rural Iraqis, who make up around 30 percent of the population.
Some 170,000 people have already been displaced in rural areas due to water scarcity, the FAO’s El Hajj Hassan said.
“This is not a matter of only food security,” he said. “It’s worse when we look at it from the perspective of livelihoods.”
At his farm in Najaf, Al-Fatlawi is now experiencing that first-hand, having cut his wheat acreage to a fifth of its normal level this season and laid off all but two of his 10 workers.
“We rely on river water,” he said.
