“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,” Itamar Katz, head forester in the Golan Heights for Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL -JNF), told JNS on Thursday.
“You ask yourself, if it happened an hour ago, what stops it from happening again,” he added.
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, foremost by Hezbollah from Lebanon.
“About three months into the war, our house was the first to be hit in Kibbutz Yiron. 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,” said Katz.
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 working. Just a few weeks ago we were fighting fires while missiles were falling on top of us in Rosh Pina and Safed,” said Katz.
“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 God nobody has been hurt yet,” he added.
Katz, who has been working for KKL-JNF for seven years, oversees all land managed by the group in the Golan Heights, around 11,000 acres.
Every year, from May until the end of November, Katz runs a special rotation for fighting fires on Fridays and Saturdays.
“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 on Wednesday.
According to the data, 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 that are manned by personnel and we work alongside the fire department, the army, volunteers and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority,” said Katz.
“KKL-JNF is good at fighting forest fires, our equipment is adapted for that scenario. The fire department protects the settlements and we fight the fire in the forests,” he continued.
“KKL-JNF has some innovation that other bodies don’t have, and private contractors that use all kinds of new technology to help us, drones, cameras and fire assessments. Often, rescue bodies use our capabilities,” he said.
While there are ways to prevent fires from spreading, they cannot be implemented everywhere.
“In the Golan Heights, we 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,” he added.
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 must make sure that there is no imminent danger to the residents once they are let back into the area,” he continued.
“We will have a long observation process to figure out the right way to rehabilitate. God willing if this never happens again, the ecosystem will hopefully be able to rehabilitate itself,” he added.
