How Israeli Community Weaponized Israel Wildfires To Push Political Agenda Against Palestinians

In late April 2025, wildfires erupted across the hills surrounding Jerusalem, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare a national emergency. The blazes burned an estimated 6,000 acres of land, including 2,000 acres of forest.

As with other disasters, a torrent of misleading news stories quickly circulated about the wildfires. While Misbar and other fact-checking outlets have been working on debunking such news lately, certain conspiracy theories within the Israeli community seized upon the incident, targeting Palestinians.

The Israeli community weaponized the blazes to incite hatred against Palestinians and justify violence.

From false attribution to recycled videos, major Israeli outlets, leaders, and prominent figures fabricated conspiracy theories to blame Palestinians without evidence.

Netanyahu Spreads Unfounded Claims Framing Palestinians as Arsonists

Around 24 hours after the wildfires, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in his speech at the annual Bible Contest in Jerusalem that 18 suspects had been arrested for allegedly starting the wildfires.

“In Palestinian media, they talk about burning the land,” Netanyahu claimed, suggesting a coordinated effort by Palestinians to cause fires.

Netanyahu’s claims surprised the Israeli police, who stated that only three Palestinian suspects had been detained, one of whom had his detention extended. None of the three was directly linked to an arson attack causing the major wildfires.

One of the suspects, a 19-year-old from Isawiya, was detained over “hateful messages” on social media, according to the Israeli police. The suspect praised the fires in social media posts, linking them to Israeli soldiers' crimes in Gaza. “They burned Gaza, so God burned them. Israel is burning—May God avenge us,” one of his posts read.

Another suspect, Riad Abu Tir, a 63-year-old resident of Umm Tuba, was arrested after police caught him “setting fire to an open field in southern Jerusalem,” Ynet reported.

Channel 12 published footage purportedly showing Abu Tir setting a fire, along with a court judge extending his detention.

An examination of the footage by Haaretz revealed that it was edited from two different camera angles and included a nine-minute gap between footage showing Abu Tir walking in the field and smoke rising from the area.

According to the police, this suspect is not linked to the main fires in the capital’s hills, as he was setting fire in a different area. The area was significantly closer to the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa than to the Jewish neighborhood of Har Homa.

The identity of the third suspect mentioned by police remains unknown.

Prominent Israeli Figures and Outlets Amplify Claims Against Palestinians

Social media posts by prominent Israeli figures echoed and amplified Netanyahu’s unsubstantiated claims, reflecting a broader pattern of scapegoating Palestinians.

Israeli journalist Edy Cohen published a video claiming to show a “Palestinian terrorist” setting fire to a forest in Israel.

Upon performing a reverse image search on the video’s frames, it turned out that the video is unrelated to Palestine or Israel. Reuters published it in 2021, captioning it as showing an arsonist starting a fire in a forest in Italy.

Several fact-checking platforms, including the Israeli watchdog Fake Reporter, debunked the claim. However, the claim remained viral.

Combat Doctrine, an Israeli account known for promoting content aligned with the Israeli military, was one of the first accounts to share the misleading video and deleted it after users pointed out that it was a recycled video. It published a correction later, while asserting that nothing changed the “fact” that “this is Muhammad from East Jerusalem.”

Israeli politician and lawyer, Member of Knesset Tally Gotliv, published a post to her 83.9K followers accusing Palestinians of igniting the fires. “A terror attack straight from the playbook of our cruel enemies,” she described the fires.

In another post, Gotliv blamed Palestinians for canceling the ceremony, which Israel canceled due to the fires.

For far-right MK Zvi Sukkot, Palestinians are necessarily presumed guilty. In an X post, he called for curfews and lockdowns on Palestinian villages, using these fires as a pretext. Sukkot did not simply post his demand on social media like others did, but went so far as to request his demand from Netanyahu.

“A curfew should be immediately imposed in Judea and Samaria, and a curfew should be imposed on the Palestinian villages,” Sukkot’s “urgent demand” to Netanyahu reads.

Others promoted a map claiming to show the locations of the fires, supposedly proving the fires were all within Israel and none reached the West Bank. Right-wing activist Ayelet Lash and Channel 14’s journalist Shimon Riklin promoted the map on their X accounts.

Combat Doctrine shared the map, captioning it with a quote from the Hebrew Bible often used to justify the forced displacement of Palestinians. The quote warned Israelites that if they fail to completely displace the native inhabitants of Canaan (the Promised Land), those remaining will become a constant source of conflict and temptation toward idolatry.

What these posts ignored is that fires erupted in Haifa, which has a Palestinian population of 33,000, and in Tel Aviv, which has a Palestinian population of 25,000.

Haaretz confirmed that the fires broke out in the Palestinian Authority on April 30, including the area near Jericho and Tulkarm.

More importantly, the map does not provide the true locations of the wildfires. It suggests that fires erupted on the borders of the West Bank and around the Gaza Strip, further suggesting the deliberate exclusion of the Palestinian-administered regions.

However, wildfires were not reported in areas like Ashkelon and Ashdod, two Israeli cities near the Gaza border, as of April 30.

Outlets like The Jerusalem Post amplified these claims, mentioning the misleading map in a report titled: “Israel ablaze in national emergency believed to be terrorist act.”

The outlet claimed that Hamas posted on social media a call for Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel to “burn whatever you can of groves, forests, and settler homes” and “set their cars ablaze.”

Another article reiterated claims that Hamas incited arson in Israel.

The outlet featured an image of a figure in a keffiyeh setting agricultural land ablaze.

The Arabic text on the image reads: “Let the settlers' homes be ashes under the feet of the revolutionaries,” alongside the hashtag “Burn the settlers’ houses.”

Misbar’s team searched for such a recent call on Hamas’ official outlets, which only exist on Telegram, but found no such call on those channels.

Basem Naim, a Hamas Political Bureau member and spokesperson, denied any involvement in the wildfires. “We have no knowledge of the identities of the detainees, nor do we have prior knowledge of these activities,” Naim confirmed to Newsweek.

Misbar’s team further searched for the image, finding that it originated from local Telegram channels, like Jericho News, Hebron News, and a channel named Al Aqsa Flood in July 2024. The calls came as an angry reaction from Palestinian youth to the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and to the escalating settler attacks in the West Bank following October 7.

Notably, on the same day that fires erupted across the Jerusalem hills, Haaretz reported that Israeli settlers set Palestinian agricultural land on fire in the West Bank.

Israel’s History of Unfounded Theories Targeting Palestinians

The conspiracy theories were not unique to these wildfires. During past wildfire outbreaks in Israel, Palestinian communities have faced similar baseless blame campaigns.

Nine years ago, Israel experienced a severe wave of wildfires. Israeli authorities accused Jawad Qattoush, a Palestinian from Battir, of arson. The Israel Security Agency detained him for five days, denying him access to legal counsel.

Footage of him starting a fire circulated on Israeli media. Far-right politicians publicly hailed the capture of the “terrorist” who made Israel suffer.

Qattoush’s family explained that he was cleaning the field and disposing of waste by burning it, as farmers usually do. Qattoush’s home was 1.5 kilometers away from any Jewish town, according to Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson.

He was later released without charge, but his permit to enter Israel was revoked, he lost his job, and his family fell into severe economic hardship because a criminal file was opened against him.

Three years after this incident, Palestinians and Israeli settlers accused each other of setting farm fields on fire. The Israeli Army initially blamed Palestinians for the act.

However, a video filmed by the Israeli human rights nonprofit organization B'Tselem showed that two Jewish settlers were responsible for the act. One of them was an Israel Defense Forces soldier.

Real Reason Behind Israel Wildfires

While the exact cause of the fire is still under investigation, Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, said the wildfires were “part of a climate crisis that we must not ignore.”

Sources cited by The Times of Israel suggested that negligence by hikers, coupled with high winds and dry weather, was to blame.

A senior Israeli fire officer scoffed at accusations of arson, asserting that the burning trees shown in viral videos on the internet were “simply trees with a bit more resin, slightly drier trunks. It was completely random.”

Ghada Sasa, a Palestinian researcher in green colonialism, suggested that the fires spread more widely because of the non-native tree species Israel has been planting since 1948.

According to Sasa, Israel planted over 240 million trees since its foundation to cover dispossessed Palestinian villages with forests—90% of these trees are non-native to the land.

Sasa identified Australian eucalyptus trees as having fueled the fires, given the fact that these species are extremely flammable. Such species further contributed to warming the weather in addition to the desertification of the land.

Researchers found that Israel has greater vulnerability to high temperatures because of its reshaped landscape, according to Al Jazeera.

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