Tens of thousands of residents have been ordered to leave Israel’s third largest city as wildfires tear across central and northern Israel, and the country’s chief of police says politically motivated arson may be behind some of the blazes.
Television pictures showed a wall of flames raging through central neighbourhoods of Haifa, a city of around 300,000 in the north of the country, engulfing a petrol station that firefighters were rapidly dousing with water.
The fires have been burning in multiple locations for the past three days but intensified on Thursday, fuelled by unseasonably dry weather and strong easterly winds.
Read the Reuters report by Rami Amichai in The Courier Mail.