More than 1,000 people died during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabiaas the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom, officials said Sunday.
More than half of the fatalities were people from Egypt, according to two officials in Cairo. Egypt revoked the licenses of 16 travel agencies that helped unauthorized pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia, authorities said.
Saudi Arabia has not commented on the deaths during the pilgrimage, which is required of every able Muslim once in their life.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
CAIRO (AP) — More than 1,000 people died during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom, officials said Sunday.
However, a Cabinet official said that at least 630 other Egyptians died during the pilgrimage, with most reported at the Emergency Complex in Mecca’s Al-Muaisem neighborhood.
The fatalities also included 165 pilgrims from Indonesia, 98 from India and dozens more from Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Malaysia, according to an Associated Press tally.
Deaths are not uncommon at the Hajj, which has seen at times over 2 million people travel to Saudi Arabia for a five-day pilgrimage.
A 2015 stampede in Mina during the Hajj killed over 2,400 pilgrims, the deadliest incident ever to strike the pilgrimage, according to an AP count.
A 2019 study by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that even if the world succeeds in mitigating the worst effects of climate change, the Hajj would be held in temperatures exceeding an “extreme danger threshold” from 2047 to 2052, and from 2079 to 2086.
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