Coping with danger while Israel’s north burns

“Often it’s not so much the fire that’s scary — it’s standing next to this crater with the remains of a rocket that wasn’t hit by the Iron Dome,” said Itamar Katz, head forester in the Golan Heights for Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL -JNF).

“You ask yourself, if it happened an hour ago, what stops it from happening again.”

Until Oct. 7, 2023, Katz lived with his wife and two children in Kibbutz Yiron in the Upper Galilee. After Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel, Katz decided to leave his kibbutz, fearing a multi-front invasion that would bring Hezbollah across the border from Lebanon.

“About three months into the war, our house was the first to be hit in Kibbutz Yiron,” said Katz. “Even if tomorrow we are cleared to go home, we can’t. The windows broke, the door flew off. Most of what I own was destroyed.”

Katz has for the past five months settled in Kibbutz Mevo Hama, another kibbutz in the Golan, with his family, his horse and dogs. His third daughter, Oren, was born there.

“Since [Hezbollah joined the war in support of Hamas] on Oct. 8, 2023, we’ve been fighting fires, just a few weeks ago while missiles were falling on top of us in Rosh Pina and Safed,” he said.

“Not once and not twice, I found myself fighting a fire while laying down on the ground during a siren, seeing Iron Dome interceptors above me,” he continued.

“Sometimes, missiles fell next to us, we got back up, continued battling the blaze through till the next siren and laid on the ground again. Thank G-d nobody has been hurt yet,” he added.

Katz oversees all land managed by KKL-JNF in the Golan Heights, around 11,000 acres.

“For the last month, all we’ve been doing is fighting fire. It’s going to be a rehabilitation project on a scale that Israel has never seen. Take all the land that burnt throughout the 2006 Second Lebanon War, all of that was gone in one month only,” he explained.

Hezbollah’s incessant cross-border attacks on northern have burned over 230,000 dunams (57,000 acres) of land, KKL-JNF said.

Israel’s Upper Galilee and Golan Heights regions have suffered the most damage, with almost 43,500 acres burned, followed by the Lower Galilee (some 6,175 acres), the Western Galilee (2,223 acres) and the Hula Valley (178 acres).

“It’s basically all the forest fires we would have had over 30 years in only seven months,” said Katz. 

The disaster has been amplified by high temperatures in Israel throughout the summer season, coupled with strong winds.

“Some of these fires take place in areas where we can’t even go into, around Metula and Kiryat Shmona, in what we call the Galilee panhandle. These are closed military areas. Manara, which is surrounded by forests, is destroyed,” said Katz. 

“In those areas, the army and the fire department take the lead. Sometimes, if it’s too dangerous, nobody goes. It’s better for a tree to burn than to lose someone. We just look through our binoculars and try to understand the damage,” he added.

Usually, the fire department arrives first at the scene with an officer and gives Katz and his team instructions. KKL-JNF personnel in the Golan total 40 people, including truck drivers, scouts, foresters, assistant foresters and helpers. 

“We have three KKL-JNF fire trucks and we work alongside the fire department, the army, volunteers and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority,” said Katz. “The fire department protects the settlements and we fight the fire in the forests.”

While there are ways to prevent fires from spreading, they cannot be implemented everywhere.

“In the Golan Heights, where w have lots of open meadows, we sometimes can create a fire break, which is basically a line with no vegetation. Just a couple days ago, I had a fire in Katzrin that burnt all the way up to the forest but stopped because of a break line,” said Katz.

“For coniferous forests and pine tree forests, it’s very different. We must make sure that the undergrowth is non-existent. If there is nothing to connect the trees to the ground, the fire won’t jump up into the trees,” he continued. “We trim and we pull to make sure there is no connection but you cannot implement this in all regions.”

According to KKL-JNF’s Forestry Department, it will take five to seven years for nature to repair the damage already incurred.

“The rehabilitation will be a multi-year, multi-faceted project. First, we must understand how the ecosystem is reacting since it has gone through a change that has never been experienced in Israel in the past,” said Katz.

“We will have a long observation process to figure out the right way to rehabilitate. G-d willing if this never happens again, the ecosystem will hopefully be able to rehabilitate itself.”