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The death toll from this year’s Hajj has surpassed 1,000, with more than half of the victims being unregistered pilgrims who performed the pilgrimage in sweltering heat in Saudi Arabia.
The new deaths reported on Thursday included 58 of the Egyptaccording to an Arab diplomat who provided a breakdown showing that of the 658 dead Egyptians, 630 were unregistered pilgrims.
About 10 countries have reported 1,081 deaths during the pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam which all Muslims of means must perform at least once.
The Hajj, whose time is determined by the lunar Islamic calendar, fell again this year during a furnace-like Saudi summer.
The National Weather Service recorded a high of 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) this week at Mecca’s Grand Mosque.
A Saudi study published last month said temperatures in the area were rising by 0.4 degrees Celsius every decade.
Every year, tens of thousands of pilgrims try to join the Hajj through irregular channels because they cannot afford the often expensive official permits.
Saudi authorities said they had cleared hundreds of thousands of unregistered pilgrims from Mecca this month, but many appeared to still be participating in the main rituals that began last Friday. This group was more vulnerable because, without official permits, they could not access air-conditioned spaces intended to cool the 1.8 million permitted pilgrims.
“People were tired after being chased by the security forces before Arafat’s day. They were exhausted,” an Arab diplomat told AFP on Thursday of Saturday’s day-long open-air prayers that marked the culmination of the hajj.
The diplomat said the main cause of death among Egyptian pilgrims was the heat, which caused complications related to high blood pressure and other problems.
Egyptian officials were visiting hospitals to get information and help Egyptian pilgrims get medical treatment, the foreign ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
“However, there are a large number of Egyptian citizens who are not registered in the Hajj databases, which requires double the effort and longer time to search for missing persons and find their relatives,” it said.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has ordered a “crisis cell” headed by the prime minister to track the deaths of pilgrims in the country.
Sisi stressed “the need for immediate coordination with Saudi authorities to facilitate the receipt of the bodies of the deceased and streamline the process,” his office said in a statement.
More deaths were confirmed Thursday from Pakistan and Indonesia.
Of the roughly 150,000 pilgrims, Pakistan has so far recorded 58 deaths, a diplomat told AFP. “I think that given the number of people, given the time, it’s quite natural,” the diplomat said.
Indonesia, which had about 240,000 pilgrims, raised the death toll to 183, the religious affairs ministry said, compared to 313 deaths recorded last year.
Deaths have also been confirmed from Malaysia, India, Jordan, Iran, Senegal, Tunisia, Sudan and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region. In many cases, the authorities did not specify the cause.
Friends and relatives are searching for missing pilgrims, scouring hospitals and begging online for news, fearing the worst.
Two diplomats told AFP on Thursday that Saudi authorities had begun the process of burying the dead pilgrims by cleaning the bodies and placing them in a white burial cloth and taking them away for burial.
“The funeral is being carried out by the Saudi authorities. They have their own system, so we just follow that,” said a diplomat who said his country was working to notify relatives as best it could.
The other diplomat said it would be impossible to notify many families ahead of time, especially in Egypt, which accounts for so many dead.
Saudi Arabia did not provide information on deaths, although it reported more than 2,700 cases of “heat exhaustion” on Sunday alone.
Last year, various countries reported more than 300 deaths during the Hajj, mostly Indonesians.
The timing of the hajj moves back about 11 days each year according to the Gregorian calendar, meaning that next year it will take place earlier in June, potentially in cooler conditions.
A 2019 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says that due to the climate crisis, heat stress for Hajj pilgrims will exceed the “threshold of extreme danger” from 2047 to 2052 and from 2079 to 2086, “with increasing frequency and intensity as the century progressed’.
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