Armed conflicts have consequences that go beyond the victims of weapons and have to do with the destruction of the environment in which human populations live. The case of the offensive in Gaza is not unrelated. “We are eating corn flour or animal feed every day,” Asmaa, a Palestinian girl displaced to a camp in the south of this Strip, says in a video, where there are practically no fields of crops or clean water.
Six months after the Israeli attacks began, environmental NGOs report that the Palestinian territory is becoming an uninhabitable place. They point out that their water treatment plants and recycling plants have been destroyed, that their agricultural soils and aquifers have been contaminated and that at least half of the few trees that existed are destroyed.
In an international forum organized by Friends of the Earth, participants from different social and political entities agreed that a catastrophe is taking place in a very small space whose effects will take a long time to resolve. “You will not be able to live there in the future,” said Yasmeen Hasan, of the Palestinian Agrarian Trade Union Committee, which is part of the global Via Campesina movement. For his part, the French MEP from the Greens group, Mounir Satori, pointed out: “It is an ecocide that endangers the way they can have their own state, with food sovereignty.”
Before the attacks on Gaza, which began after the attack by the Hamas terrorist group at a music festival in Israel, the environmental situation in the strip and in the West Bank was already very worrying. According to the UN Environment Program (UNEP), there was previous serious marine pollution; The wetlands of Wadi Gaza – converted into wasteland after the diversion of the waters of the Habesor River – had become veritable landfills and were just beginning to be restored thanks to the support of a multimillion-dollar international project; and climate change was wreaking havoc through droughts or serious floods, caused when it rained and the dams on the other side of the territory’s limits would fail.
At a side event at COP28 in Dubai in the fall of 2023, officials from the Palestinian Authority for Water Resources, Energy and Environmental Quality reported that they were suffering from severe water shortages, not least because the coastal aquifer was at risk of salinization. , due to the rise in sea levels, but also due to its dependence on Israel for the supply of this resource, given that it was its supplier since they signed an agreement for this purpose in 1995.
Now, concern with the current conflict has skyrocketed. “Due to the daily deaths, one might think that the environmental issue is minor, but it is directly related to the lack of food and drinking water, and therefore to famine and disease. Furthermore, Palestine is losing the ability to offer minimum conditions to its population for the future,” said the French MEP.
Among the direct impacts, attendees listed the proven use of white phosphorus, bombs that can contaminate soils for years; the weapons and projectiles that decompose without being collected and pass into water resources, the polluting emissions generated by bombings, the thousands of corpses under the rubble… “We are collecting samples of the land, water and sanitation for a project with a university in order to see how far the impact goes. We have 65 sewage pumps destroyed and there is no fuel to operate the water treatment, which is reaching the sea untreated. “We also no longer have the photovoltaic panels that we had.”
“At the same time, waste accumulates everywhere, including toilets, which are more dangerous. Each person in Gaza receives between one and two liters of water a day to live, so they are using water from the sea, which we know is contaminated,” said Rasha Abu Dayyeh, from the Palestinian Pengon Network of environmental NGOs.
At this point in the conflict, Palestinian hydrologist AbdelRahaman Al Tamimi estimates that 83% of the wells in the Strip are not working. “In the short term the environmental damage is evident – Al Tamimi mentioned – but in the long term also because the pollution in the aquifers can last for centuries.” In his opinion, whether the war continues or there is a truce, there will be no solution for a long time to the problems generated.
In relation to the soil, the British research group Forensic Architecture, after an exhaustive analysis of satellite images, has concluded that in these months almost all the orchards and agricultural infrastructure in Gaza have disappeared. They point out that in 2023 there were about 170 square kilometers of agricultural land, fields that provided food for the population. According to this research, 40% of these lands have been devastated. In total, Forensic Architecture has identified more than 2,000 agricultural spaces, including farms and greenhouses, destroyed since last October.
Mounir Satori also mentioned the situation in the West Bank. He assured that “the settlers are now accelerating the appropriation of Palestinian lands and those who maintain them have many difficulties in being able to irrigate them.” And he mentioned that the inhabitants of this territory “only have 60 liters of water a day”, well below what is recommended by the WHO. It is worth remembering that last summer in this area they already had temperatures close to 50ºC and this coming one does not seem like it will be cooler.
For her part, deputy Elsa Faucillon, also French, argued that this situation “has roots prior to what is happening today.” “I have met Palestinians from the West Bank who had half of their land taken away from them and then set up chemical industries next to what they had left, making it difficult for them to grow crops. The environmental environment of the Palestinians is a disaster,” she stated.
