Who or what is responsible for Hajj deaths? - ITREALMS

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The debate:
As the death toll rises, debate is raging over whether bad organization, weather or gate-crashing pilgrims are to blame for more than 1,000 reported deaths in Saudi Arabia during the annual Hajj religious gathering.

Muslim pilgrims use umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun as they arrive to cast stones at pillars in the symbolic stoning of the devil, the last rite of the annual hajj.

Around 1.8 million pilgrims came to perform Hajj in Saudi Arabia in blistering temperatures.

Arabic-language social media has been flooded this week with shocking images from Saudi Arabia. The pictures and videos show people who were undertaking their once-in-a-lifetime Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca collapsed on the side of the road or slumped in wheelchairs, apparently close to death or dead. 

They are dressed in traditional pilgrim's white, their faces covered with cloths. In several pictures, corpses appear to have been left where they presumably collapsed.

What started as a rumor on social media was confirmed as the weeklong Hajj pilgrimage ended: Hundreds of pilgrims have died in Saudi Arabia, evidently due to extremely high temperatures and lack of shelter or water.

Temperatures in Mecca, Islam's holiest city, rose to 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) during the course of the annual event, which started late last week.

Around 1.8 million Muslims from all over the world had been expected in Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj. One of the world's largest religious gatherings, the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam. Every Muslim who is able to is supposed to perform it at least once in their lifetime.


Hundreds reported dead from Hajj heatwave in Mecca:
Sources in the Saudi Arabian Health Ministry told Reuters news agency they had recorded 2,700 cases of "heat exhaustion." But they had been speaking before reports of deaths began to emerge. The country has not updated official statistics since then.


According to AFP news agency, which has been tallying up fatalities via different sources and countries over the past few days, the death toll has topped 1,000.

*Contributed by Mohamed Farhan for DW/Editor