MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The petrochemical factories polluting Israel's third-largest city of Haifa and reportedly increasing cancer rates are to immediately stop their work, Mayor Yona Yahav said Sunday.
"Beginning from this moment, there will be no entrance of containers into the factories and the supply of fuel and ammonia to the Israeli economy will be prevented," Yahav said as quoted by the Jerusalem Post newspaper.
The mayor went on to accuse the Israeli government of the situation, saying the authorities pretended that everything was going just as it should.
Between 1998 and 2007, about 780 of the 4,860 cancer cases in Haifa likely resulted from air pollution, according to the American Journal of Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention.
