By Mara Vigevani/TPS
The Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance will provide financial support to farmers living in the Gaza belt who have suffered material damage from flammable kites and helium balloons sent over from Gaza by Hamas-sent terrorists with the aim of setting fields on fire and physical and environmental damages.
The aid applies to wheat crops that are prevalent in the area and is conditional on farmers bringing forward the harvests in order to minimize potential damages and reap the wheat before it can be set on fire.
The ministries set aside NIS 2 million in compensation for the farmers and will pay up to NIS 60 for each dunam of wheat that harvested by June 10th; in a regular season, wheat is normally harvested at the beginning of July.
The farmers entitled to receive the incentives are those with fields within a range of up to seven kilometers from the Gaza border.
“The incentives will help us to increase working hours or to bring in additional combine harvesters,” Ofer Liberman a farmer from Kibbutz Nir Am near Sderot told Tazpit Press Service (TPS).
“The wheat is ready to be reaped, the incentives will help to harvest it more quickly. The government will also save money as compensation for each dunam set on fire is very high,” Liberman added.
He said that the fires had caused him damages of around one million shekels of crops and irrigation equipment and that although the IDF had begun implementing new measures to combat the kites, including specialized drones designed to neutralize them, it had yet to resolve the problem. “It is very hard to stop this new phenomenon. I saw the IDF is using drones to cut the cable of the kites, but still there is no solution for the helium balloons,” Liberman said.
So far, the fires have caused millions of shekels in damages. A blaze sparked by flammable kites last week near Kibbutz Be’eri, some seven kilometers from the Gaza border took over six hours to extinguish and consumed dozens of dunams of grasslands and agricultural fields in the area.