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Wildfires in the Middle East caused by a heat wave that hit the region have killed 3 people, forced thousands of people to flee their homes and exploded landmines along the border between Lebanon and Israel, officials and state media said.
The areas affected by the heat wave are Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, where the fires break out amid unusually high temperatures at this time of year.
Wildfires spread to different areas of Israel and the West Bank for a second day, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes.
Israeli police said in a statement that firefighters and police forces evacuated 5,000 residents from the town of Nof El-Galilee in northern Israel.
Among the countries hardest hit by the fires is Syria, which has been ravaged by war, where the fires have killed two people and injured dozens of people with respiratory problems in the past two days.
The fires also set fire to large areas of forests, most of them in the central province of Homs and the coastal governorate of Latakia.
With the firefighters working with all their energy, some neighbors helped them using primitive methods such as carrying water in buckets and pouring it on the fire.
On Saturday, prayers for rain were held in mosques across Syria to stop the drought and rain to put out the fires.
The official Syrian news agency (SANA) quoted the director of the Forestry Department of the Directorate of Agriculture in Latakia Basem Duba, saying that the number of fires reached 85 in different places.
Also in Lattakia governorate, fires in the city of Qardaha, the birthplace of President Bashar al-Assad, severely damaged a building used as a warehouse for the state tobacco company, and part of it collapsed.
In Lebanon, firefighters, supported by military helicopters, fought fires in the north, center and south of the country.
A large fire in the southern town of Butter set hundreds of pine trees on fire and was approaching houses when it was brought under control.
Along the border with Israel, the official Lebanese news agency reported fires in several villages, some of which sparked the explosion of landmines along the heavily guarded front.
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