Intense heat kills hundreds during this year's Hajj, officials say

Hundreds of people have died during this year's Hajj pilgrimage as the faithful faced intense high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia, officials said as people tried to claim their loved ones' bodies.

Hundreds of people had lined up at the Emergency Complex in the Muaisem neighbourhood in Mecca, trying to get information about their missing family members.

Security appeared tight at the complex, AP news agency reported, with an official reading out names of the dead and the nationalities, which included people from Algeria, Egypt and India. Those who said they were kin of the dead were allowed inside to identify the deceased.

One list circulating online suggested at least 550 people died during the five-day Hajj.

A medic who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information not released publicly by the government said that the names listed appeared genuine. That medic and another official who also spoke on condition of anonymity said they believed at least 600 bodies were at the facility.

The list offered no cause of death. But several countries have said some of their pilgrims died because of the heat that swept across the holy sites at Mecca, including Jordan, Tunisia and India.

A diplomat in Saudi Arabia told AFP news agency on Wednesday that 68 Indian nationals were among the hundreds of Hajj pilgrims who died during the pilgrimage.

"We have confirmed around 68 dead... Some are because of natural causes and we had many old-age pilgrims. And some are due to the weather conditions, that's what we assume," said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Two Arab diplomats, coordinating their countries' responses, said at least 323 Egyptian pilgrims died during the Hajj pilgrimage, most of them succumbing to heat-related illnesses.

"All of them died because of heat" except for one who sustained fatal injuries during a minor crowd crush, one of the diplomats said, adding that the total figure came from the hospital morgue in the Al-Muaisem neighbourhood of Mecca.

At least 60 Jordanians also died, the diplomats said, up from an official tally of 41 given earlier on Tuesday by Amman. The new deaths bring the total reported so far by various countries to 577, according to an AFP tally.

Saudi Arabia has not commented on the death toll.

Temperatures on Tuesday reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) in Mecca and the sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology.

More than 1.83 million Muslims performed the Hajj in 2024, including more than 1.6 million pilgrims from 22 countries, and around 222,000 Saudi citizens and residents, according to the Saudi Hajj authorities.