They see smoke, grab their gear and run: Inside the battle against suspected arson fires

The Judea and Samaria District of the Fire and Rescue Service reported 5,850 fires in 2022, 5,854 in 2023, 5,866 in 2024, and 5,543 in 2025, plus 3,086 from January to July 2026.

By Pesach Benson and Omer Novoselsky, TPS

Racing up smoke-filled hillsides with fire beaters and water bottles has become routine for hundreds of volunteers across Judea and Samaria, where suspected arson fires can ignite within seconds but take hours to contain.

The network they built three years ago now numbers 500-600 people — and in a single recent week, it logged seven suspected arson incidents in the Binyamin region, north of Jerusalem, and in Samaria.

Palestinian social media accounts have sometimes accused Israeli residents of starting fires that local volunteers were responding to, while other channels have published calls for using fire against Israeli communities.

The true number of suspected arson incidents remains unknown, since only a fraction of fires receive a full investigation.

The dangers go beyond property. A fire near Derech Avraham Farm in July ended with a responding farmer stabbed by a Palestinian; investigators later determined the blaze had been deliberately set.

Volunteers, farmers, and officials described the scope of the arson threat and the disputed accounts surrounding individual fires in interviews with The Press Service of Israel.

Palestinian Incitement

The Yesha Council, the umbrella body for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, argues that accusations against Israeli residents often circulate before investigations are complete.

“The repeated arson attacks do not end in the field; within minutes they become a campaign of lies that attempts to turn the victim into the accused,” said Israel Ganz, the council’s chairman and head of the Binyamin Regional Council, to TPS-IL.

“This is a dangerous method that combines terrorism on the ground with information warfare in the international arena. The State of Israel must fight on both fronts simultaneously: bring the arsonists to justice and expose the mechanism of incitement and false accusations being spread against the settlement enterprise.”

Palestinian social media channels, particularly Telegram, have also carried explicit calls to use fire against Israeli communities.

In 2025, one Shechem (Nablus)-based channel posted, “Go out and burn the forests and groves adjacent to the settlements.”

Another urged followers to “set fire to the gardens and the vehicles” near community groves, while a third called to “set fires in the settlements, strike the friction points and block the bypass roads.”

A Jenin-based outlet published a call to “burn the settlements and set hell ablaze in them.”

Fewer such calls have surfaced in 2026, though the Palestinian Information Center (PIC) listed an “arson operation in the settlements” among “quality operations,” alongside shootings and explosive devices.

PIC reports are widely circulated by Hamas-aligned Palestinian media. The posts do not prove that any specific message caused a particular fire, but they show that arson is openly promoted online.

For Eitan, a volunteer civilian firefighter in the Binyamin region, questions of definition come after the fact.

“Arson is terrorism for all intents and purposes,” he told TPS-IL. “When he doesn’t succeed in making assassination attempts, he tries with fire, both to kill and murder and even to damage property.”

Seven Attacks in One Week

Eitan told TPS-IL the volunteer group he is part of was founded about three years ago by farm owners who saw suspected arson incidents increasing and wanted to create a rapid response network.

“It is working significantly to reduce the damage caused by the fires,” he said.

The network, made up of residents willing to respond immediately at any hour, receives no government support, Eitan said.

He said the group recorded seven suspected arson incidents in a single week in the Binyamin region alone — a figure he stressed does not reflect the wider picture.

He explained that firefighting groups in other regions see similar trends.

“There are more arsons in the Jordan Valley, Samaria, Judea, Mount Hebron, and Gush Etzyon,” he said. “The activity is very, very intense.”

Eitan estimated the group’s own tally captures roughly 80-90% of suspected arson incidents in its area—a figure maintained by the volunteer network itself, not an official statistic.

When Grazing Land Burns

Fire damage outlasts the smoke, said Yehuda Ozery, a farmer from the South Hebron Hills.

“It burns the grazing land, and that is the food for the sheep during the summer and winter,” he said.

“It also seals the ground and dries it out, taking away all the good things in it. And of course, not to mention putting out the fire—that is a matter of human life, and it can reach communities and kill people and burn homes.”

Arson was nearly a daily occurrence in his area last year, Ozery said, though less frequent this year. Plowed firebreaks have helped.

“Where we plowed, it didn’t burn, and it created an incredible defensive line. Where we didn’t plow, everything went up in flames.”

Matan Morad, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority’s head ranger for Judea and Samaria, described similar buffer measures.

“We take action to create physical buffer lines using mechanical engineering tools to create a defined buffer line, between 25 and 40 meters, depending on the soil and vegetation, so that when the fire starts, it can be limited.”

What the Numbers Show

Official figures specifically identifying arson incidents are difficult to obtain because Israel’s Fire and Rescue Services does not investigate the cause of every fire and does not maintain a separate public category for suspected arson.

Asked for data on arson, the Judea and Samaria District of the Fire and Rescue Service reported 5,850 fires in 2022, 5,854 in 2023, 5,866 in 2024, and 5,543 in 2025, plus 3,086 from January to July 2026.

A 2024 State Comptroller report found investigators examined only 9% of fires in 2022 and 14.3% in 2023.

Between 2019 and 2022, police opened 12,084 arson cases; three-quarters were closed, with indictments in 918 cases—including only 76 of 228 nationally motivated cases.

“There are arson attacks in Judea and Samaria, and we are familiar with the issue and prepared,” the Fire and Rescue Service noted in its response to TPS-IL, stressing that many fires are not the result of arson and that officials continuously assess weather and ground conditions.

Minutes That Matter

Eitan said the first response team typically arrives within ten minutes of an alert, by which point a fire is often already spreading along multiple fronts.

According to Eitan, extinguishing a deliberately set fire usually takes at least 40 minutes. Many of these fires take place on hillsides and in wadis that are often inaccessible to fire engines.

“The struggle is difficult because you are dealing with the flames, the smoke, the heat… you have to run and climb and go down and up with bats in your hands or blowers on your back or both, and also bottles of water and a lot of equipment, so it is tough,” he said.

Amaziah Francis, a security coordinator for the Association of Farms of Judea and Samaria, said hundreds of volunteers can reach a major fire within 20 to 30 minutes.

“The farm is not just the farm itself; it is also the crops that the fires are damaging,” he said.

“Within 20 minutes to half an hour you can find 300 volunteers from the communities in the area, who come with bats and equipment to put out the fire, and this happens in cooperation with security officials and the army and the fire department to optimize the force.”

More than 500 volunteers turned out at Gilad Farm, saving many homes, Francis said. Fire, he added, allows attackers to inflict damage without entering a farm.

“The other side has learned that it has the ability to do damage; it doesn’t have to penetrate the farm but burn and ‘go home.’ We live this story; we know that many times these are deliberate arsons with the aim of harming us and the space and the grazing areas. We need to treat this as an attack in every way.”

Five Case Studies

The Yesha Council’s Research and Information Department compiled recent incidents showing how public claims about responsibility can diverge from investigative findings.

The following cases, provided by the Yesha Council and reviewed by TPS-IL, illustrate disputes over responsibility for fires and the challenges of establishing facts before investigations are complete.

On June 4, a fire in grazing land at Hesed Olam Farm in western Binyamin spread toward a vehicle compound near the Palestinian village of Shuqba.

A Palestinian post later claimed Israelis were “burning a sports field containing cars” there. The Hesed Olam blaze was one of two unrelated fires that broke out in western Binyamin that day.

Deputy Fire Commissioner Eliran Tzruya, head of the district’s Investigations and Intelligence Branch, confirmed both as arson, though the finding did not identify who set the grazing land alight.

“Since yesterday, several investigative actions have been carried out in connection with the fires in Binyamin. In the past hour, we completed all the required investigative actions, and it can now be determined that in both cases this was arson, although there is no connection between the two fires,” Tzruya was quoted as saying in a report prepared by the Yesha Council, the umbrella body for Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and shared with TPS-IL.

On June 9, a fire broke out in grazing areas of Sela Harimon Farm in eastern Binyamin. Volunteers who responded said stones were thrown at them. The following day, some Palestinian media accounts accused Jews of setting the fire.

On June 18, near Sfat Hamidbar Farm in the South Hebron Hills, shepherds who noticed a fire went to extinguish it. Some Palestinian accounts later accused the farmers of setting it. No official conclusion was included in material provided to TPS-IL.

On July 5, Palestinian pages reported that Israelis were “setting fire to Palestinian land” near Turmus Aya, north of Ramallah.

A Binyamin incident log recorded that five residents went out to extinguish a fire between the community and the village and that roughly 15 Palestinians threw stones at them. The log did not establish who started the fire.

In March, a separate claim that Israelis had set fire to a home in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, was refuted by police, who said the blaze in a temporary structure in Khirbet al-Markaz was likely caused by a faulty electrical connection, with no accelerant found.

The farmers told TPS-IL that the damage is very severe during the summer, but they hope for at least a partial recovery during the winter.