Israel’s war with Hamas has destroyed most of Gaza’s farms. Environmental costs are rising
Israel’s war with Hamas has devastated Gaza in potentially irreversible ways – and the picture of environmental damage is only beginning to emerge, as violence spreads across the region.
Israel has dropped thousands of bombs, clearing much of Gaza’s trees and farmland above buildings, while leaving behind toxic waste and destroying water and sanitation facilities. Greenhouse gas emissions accumulate due to explosions, military vehicles and overseas arms shipments.
As fighting in Lebanon and tensions between Israel and Iran continue to escalate, so do concerns about the climate and environmental impact of war.
“Its intensity is an order of magnitude greater than what we’ve seen before – because it’s been going on for a long time, because it’s been a deliberate attempt to cause massive damage in Gaza,” said Doug Weir, a director in the UK. -based Conflict and Environment Observatory, a group that works to increase awareness of the environmental consequences of war.
Destruction of agricultural land
The environment cannot escape the ravages of wars around the world, which almost invariably cause significant pollution and destroy wildlife habitats, with consequences that last for generations. Scientists have expressed similar concerns about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, which is taking place over a large area.
The damage to agriculture in the Gaza Strip is one such example. He Yin, head of the Remote Sensing and Land Science Lab at Kent State University in Ohio, has been studying that impact in Gaza for the past year using satellite images. His photos show that Israel has destroyed 70 percent of its farmland and palm trees in the year since the war began.
“The extent of the damage is incredible. [According to the] According to the Geneva Convention, agricultural fields should not be targeted during wartime,” Yin said.
“Environmental damage, it’s huge, and it affects everything.”
Plants cool soil temperatures and absorb carbon dioxide, so deforestation could exacerbate the effects of climate change in a large area that is already warming twice as much as the rest of the world.
Yin said he has never seen other war-torn areas with such high levels of agricultural damage.
The Israel Defense Forces “definitely do not use water, agricultural land or any auxiliary resources as a weapon of war,” a military spokesman said in a statement, but Hamas embeds military equipment “in, under and near” farmland.
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“The IDF finds and destroys these terrorist infrastructures, found, among other places, in the agricultural and water areas in question.”
Yin is concerned that damage to land and crops will continue to spread as the war spreads across the region and into Gaza.
“Some areas that have really unique flora and fauna … I’m worried that, if the war continues, before long, they will be gone,” he said. “So we’re also going to lose all these evergreens, all these important natural habitats.”
Since April, Israel has dropped approximately 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. And by July, Israel’s use of explosive weapons had produced more than 42 million tons of debris, the UN estimated, much of which may have been contaminated with organic waste, unexploded bombs, asbestos and other hazardous construction materials.
Israel launched an attack on Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023 in Israel killed around 1,200 people and captured around 250 people in Gaza, according to Israeli figures. The subsequent ground attack has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians since then, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced.
Greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere
A June study by an international team of researchers found that emissions from the first 120 days of the war alone were greater than the annual emissions of 26 countries and territories.
Co-author Benjamin Neimark, senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, says the study did not include all related emissions and was only intended to provide a “smooth picture” of the peak period for military emissions.
“Now we are looking [more than] 365 days. And expand geographically, geographically, let’s say, and combat types. Then you are sure to get a very high number,” he said.
Neimark says the biggest source is likely the continued shipment of weapons from North America and Europe to Israel via large cargo jets.
Currently, militaries report their emissions voluntarily – and transparently, if at all, but one joint study estimates that military operations account for 5.5 percent of global emissions.
“Actually, we can’t cut what we don’t know, right? And now we know very little,” Neimark said.
Dirty water, damaged sanitation facilities
The Palestinian Water Authority reported in October that more than 85 percent of water and sanitation facilities in Gaza are not fully or partially functional due to Israeli attacks on critical water and wastewater infrastructure. As a result, raw sewage has been dumped into the Mediterranean, polluting the sea and contributing to water-borne diseases.
As the conflict escalates across the region, some fear that Israel could target Iran’s oil infrastructure, which Weir said could cause massive fires and massive air, land and water damage that could spill over to neighboring countries.
There are few ways to hold countries accountable for wartime environmental destruction, although several countries want ecocide to be an international crime.
For individuals, the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, considers it a war crime to cause serious damage to the environment that is “obviously strong in terms of concrete and direct military advantage expected.”
‘Some of them can’t be fixed’: scientist
Mazin Qumsiyeh, the director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, says that Israel is committing genocide and deliberately making Gaza lifeless – a charge South Africa has brought to the UN High Court.
Israel has repeatedly denied such allegations, contradicting the findings of some human rights organizations.
“Others [the damage] will be fixed, but the other one will not be fixed,” said Qumsiyeh. “We won’t know these things for sure until we have access and are able to collect soil samples and water samples and analyze them in laboratories.
Ismail Alyan says he was having breakfast with his family when his apartment near the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was nearly destroyed in an Israeli attack on June 8 that rescued four Israeli hostages but killed more than 270 Palestinians.
“All the research facilities in Gaza have been destroyed, so we have no chance to use any laboratory inside.”
The destruction of agricultural land is severely damaging Gaza’s economy, halting food exports and eliminating one of the largest sources of employment, he said.
In addition to the destruction of the environment and economy, Qumsiyeh says it is also damaging the culture of the Palestinian people. The area that includes the Palestinian territories as well as Israel was among the first in the world to develop agriculture thousands of years ago.
“The damage is beyond understanding not only in economics, but in the social background and cultural connections with the world.”
Qumsiyeh said about one-third of Wadi Gaza Nature Reserve has also been heavily damaged by the war, including near-miss attacks such as Israeli airstrikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in June that Palestinian officials say killed at least 274 people and wounded 698.
Although there is currently no way to measure the impact, he says there is likely to be damage to the animals that live there, including foxes, wolves and raptors and owls that are at risk of extinction.
In addition to the human tragedy, Qumsiyeh says that it is “absurd” in nature to see the Middle East war enter Lebanon without serious discussions about the diplomatic possibilities.
“Wars are a disaster for the global environment, not just for the local area,” he said. “When we see the hurricanes now affecting the US, it’s all related.
“These are not the only things. We can no longer withstand wars.”
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