Greece fires - live: Jet2 and Tui scrap Rhodes flights as tourists fleeing island describe ‘hell on earth’

Jet2 and Tui have cancelled all flights to Rhodes as wildfires continue to tear through the Greek holiday destination for a sixth consecutive day. The Jet2 planes were scheduled to depart from the East Midlands, Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Newcastle and Stansted airports full of tourists bound for the Greek island. But the planes left emply and will instead be used to evacuate holidaymakers fleeing the blaze. Fire crews are now in a race against time to stop the fires from spreading further with 21mph (34kph) winds forecast for tomorrow. Thousands of tourists were forced to flee their hotels and images captured their dramatic evacuation off of beaches by a fleet of private boats while the fires raged in the background. Becky Mulligan, a 29-year-old training manager from Leicester, was staying at the Princess Sun Hotel in the Kiotari resort on Rhodes’s southeast coast when she, her daughter, 5 and sister, 20 say they were forced to flee. “I thought I was going to die. It was like hell on earth,” she told The Independent. Read More Wildfires on Greek island of Rhodes force thousands of holidaymakers to evacuate From body bags of ice to pavement burn: US grapples with new extreme heat reality Hiker, 71, dies in Death Valley shortly after being asked by reporter why he was braving heat: ‘Why not?’ July 2023 is set to be world’s hottest month in ‘hundreds, if not thousands, of years’