hOda Naguib and her husband had walked 20 kilometers under the scorching sun Saudi Arabia when she told him he needed to rest. The couple, who are in their 60s, had just climbed Mount Arafat, along with thousands of other white-robed pilgrims on the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, where temperatures of up to 51.8C were recently recorded on shady days .
Naguib’s husband left her to perform a ritual known as stoning the devil. When he returned, she was gone, their neighbor Wala Roshdi explained.
Fellow pilgrims told him his wife was suffering from exhaustion and was taken to a hospital in Mina, Roshdi said. The husband — who Roshdi said requested anonymity while searching for his wife — went to the hospital, where staff told him she had been treated and left. Since then he has been unreachable.
Roshdi, who works as a tour guide in Saudi Arabia, knows the couple from their hometown of Tanta, Egypt.
“We have contacted all the relevant Saudi authorities, but we are sure it will take a long time because there are thousands of people who are missing,” he said.
More than 1,000 pilgrims died while performing this year’s Hajj in extreme heat, According to according to data gathered by Arab diplomats who spoke to the AFP news agency. The vast majority, like the Naguibs, were unregistered pilgrims from Egypt who entered Mecca without the official permits now required by Saudi law.
A senior Saudi official defended the country’s management of the pilgrimage on Friday. “The state did not fail, but there was a misjudgment by people who did not appreciate the risks,” the official told AFP in the government’s first comments on the deaths.
All Muslims who are able are obliged to perform Hajj at least once in their lifetime. Saudi authorities have taken steps to control crowds and provided amenities such as air-conditioned tents to make the pilgrimage more bearable, but these are only available to registered pilgrims.
“The travel companies should have warned people about all this, but they just want to make money,” Roshdi said.
A video posted on social media by Yasemin Mertcan, a Turkish tour operator, showed exhausted pilgrims lying on the side of open roads around Mecca, some spraying their unconscious companions with water in the hope of reviving them.
Mertkan’s footage also showed some pilgrims helping Saudi security forces load corpses into burial shrouds on carts to be taken away.
“It was very difficult this year. The number of dead and missing pilgrims is very high,” Mertkan said.
Saudi officials have said they want to increase the number of annual pilgrims visiting Mecca year-round to 30 million by 2030 as part of the Vision 2030 plan, which aims to wean the kingdom off oil revenue with measures including boosting tourism .
In an effort to avoid a repeat of the deadly stampede in 2015, the Saudi government this year launched a campaign called “no Hajj without permission,” where authorities in Mecca pressed that anyone who attempted to enter the holy city without the necessary permission would be subject to severe punishment.
The opposition National Assembly party, made up of exiled Saudi dissidents, condemned Saudi authorities for their “negligence” towards the pilgrims, describing a “systematic media blackout” of the deaths.
The Naguibs arrived in Mecca two months before the start of the hajj, paying the equivalent of £2,155 to a broker in Egypt for the unofficial pilgrimage, where they shared a basic room with six others in a location outside the holy city that required more walking than official pilgrims.
They arrived shortly before intense early summer temperatures blanketed Saudi Arabia and much of the Middle East .
The Gulf is already one of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, which intensified the summer heat wave. The climate change index shows the temperature in Mecca during Hajj was 2.8C above averagean increase that he says is largely due to climate change.
Even a slight rise in temperature can stretch the limits of human endurance for events such as the Hajj, which takes place during the warmer months. 2019 MIT study warned that rising temperatures in the summer months could pose an “extreme danger” to pilgrims attending the event.
Roshdi said many pilgrims are older, have saved for years to attend the hajj and suffer from underlying illnesses that increase the risks posed by spending hours outdoors in extreme heat.
“These people cannot walk all these distances in such extremely hot weather,” he said. “It’s all because travel companies and brokers want to make money.”
