Burning fields

At a lovely leibedik wedding last night I met a woman from a village in the north-west Negev. She asked me if I could smell the smoke on her clothes because her region has been burning for days and weeks by now as fire-kites are sent over from Gaza in waves to destroy the fields, woodland and nature reserves on the Israeli side of the border.

The gentle hills and lowlands of the North-West Negev are Israel's grain basket and this time of year are covered in flammable fields of ripe wheat which can ignite and burn out in minutes, before fire crews can get to them, tons of food crops lost in an instant. Food which would go to Palestinians in Gaza, not just to Israelis.

In this clip you can see video of the arson damage to the farmland in this region. If you are wondering why no villages have burned, it's a mix of luck and sparse populations, there is a lot more farmland and nature reserve land than homes, though some fires have come pretty close and homes have had to be evacuated because of the proximity of the flames.