In Gaza, Israel is waging an invisible environmental war Premium

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has caused immense environmental damage, from destruction of crops to contamination of water and air. The effects of this ecological violence are felt by both Palestinians and Israelis, and are likely to persist long after the conflict ends.

In October, Israel hit the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza with a 2,000-pound bomb twice. The bombs – the second-largest in Israel’s arsenal, according to an investigation by The New York Times – left 40-foot-wide craters in the ground and turned the site into a pile of rubble, killing hundreds.

In the nearly two months since the Israel-Hamas conflict began, Israel has bombarded Gaza without pause, using an array of missiles but also white phosphorus – a compound whose use in densely populated areas violates international humanitarian law, according to Human Rights Watch. In the first month, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor recorded that Israel had dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives at 12,000+ targets in the Gaza Strip.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, a body under the U.S. Department of Defence, the 2,000-pound Mk-84 bombs are generally filled with tritonal – a mix of one part aluminium and three parts trinitrotoluene or TNT. When it detonates, the soil, water, and air in the blast radius are all exposed to these substances.

The Gaza Strip is only 41 km long yet has faced decades of repeated bombardment. As a result, the weapons have caused a considerable amount of environmental damage, the effects of which lie beyond what the eye sees.

The chemical components of these bombs are absorbed in the soil or washed into the sea, becoming a dangerous externality that has always languished in the shadow of war. Even the broken buildings – typical of all modern wars – are pollutants. “The destruction seen today in Gaza, after one month, is equivalent to four years of war in Syria,” Marwa Daoudy, an associate professor of international relations and the Seif Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies at Georgetown University, told The Hindu.

This means a large quantity of the materials that are used to make buildings lies on the area’s streets, unsorted and undisposed of. According to a study by PAX, a peace organisation in the Netherlands, rubble from broken buildings includes hazardous materials like asbestos, cement, heavy metals, domestic chemicals, and combustion products, which can cause lung irritation or disease, chest pain, or more serious and chronic nervous and respiratory issues in the case of long-term exposure. Dr. Daoudy said that this “toxic rubble” needs to be cleared out using specific cleaning procedures with specific equipment, since the disposal of such medical and industrial waste and rubble requires special attention to avoid contamination. But because of the blockade Israel imposed in 2007, this is practically impossible.

Before Israel’s occupation, the land known as Palestine grew a variety of crops, including grapefruit, strawberries, Jaffa oranges, almonds, watermelon, eggplants, and of course olives. According to one estimate, 45% of arable land in the occupied Palestinian territories is covered by olive trees.