The war between Israel and Hamas has wiped out most of Gaza’s agricultural land. The environmental costs are piling up

The war between Israel and Hamas has devastated Gaza in ways that may be irreversible – and a picture of the damage to the environment is only just beginning to emerge as violence spreads across the region.

Israel has dropped thousands of bombs, wiping out most of Gaza’s trees and farmland, in addition to buildings, while leaving behind toxic debris and destroying water and sanitation facilities. Greenhouse gas emissions are piling up 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 war’s impact on the climate and environment.

“Its intensity is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen before – because it’s been going on for so long, because it was a deliberate attempt to do very serious damage to Gaza,” said Doug Weir, Britain’s chief executive . -based Conflict and Environment Observatory, a group that works to raise awareness of the environmental impact of war.

Destruction of agricultural land

The environment cannot escape the damage caused by wars around the world, which almost always 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 larger geographical area.

Damage to agriculture in the Gaza Strip is an example of this. He Yin, head of the Remote Sensing and Land Science Lab at Kent State University in Ohio, has been studying that impact in Gaza over the past year using satellite images. His images show that Israel has destroyed 70 percent of the strip’s agricultural land and tree cover in the year since the war broke out.

“The damage rate is quite astonishing. [According to the] Geneva Convention, agricultural fields should not be targeted in time of war,” Yin said.

“The damage to the environment is enormous and affects everything.”

Plants lower the temperature of the land surface and also absorb carbon dioxide, so the destruction of vegetation could worsen the effects of climate change over a larger area that is already warming. twice the rate from the rest of the world.

Yin said he has not seen any other war zone with such a high damage rate to agricultural land.

The Israeli military “certainly does not use water, agricultural land or any humanitarian resource as a weapon of war,” a military spokesman said in a statement, but Hamas anchors military assets “in, under and in the vicinity of” agricultural lands.

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“The IDF is locating and destroying this terror infrastructure, which has been discovered, among other things, in and near the agricultural and water facilities in question.”

Yin is concerned that damage to land and vegetation will continue to spread as the war spreads across the region and continues in Gaza.

“Some areas with really unique flora and native plants… I’m afraid that if the war continues, sooner or later these will disappear too,” he said. “So we’re also going to lose all these endemic plants and all these important ecosystems.”

From April onwards, Israel also had that decreased an estimated 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 generated more than 42 million tons of debris, the UN estimates, much of which may be contaminated with biological waste, unexploded bombs, asbestos and other harmful construction materials.

Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 killed around 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage in Gaza, according to Israeli figures. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 42,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the subsequent ground invasion. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced.

Greenhouse gas emissions into the air

A study from June An international team of researchers found that emissions during the first 120 days of the war alone were greater than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries and territories.

Co-author Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, says the study does not include all related emissions and was only intended to provide a “conservative snapshot” of a very intense period of military carbon emissions.

‘Now we look [more than] 365 days. And expand it spatially, geographically, let’s say, and also types of battles. Then you will definitely get a much higher number,” he said.

Neimark says the largest source is likely the continued shipment of weapons from North America and Europe to Israel on large cargo planes.

Currently, militaries report their emissions voluntarily – and flawlessly, if at all, but one joint study estimates that military activities are responsible for 5.5 percent of global emissions.

“Essentially, we can’t leave out what we don’t know, right? And now we know very little,” Neimark said.

Polluted water, damaged sewerage

The Palestinian Water Authority reported in October that more than 85 percent of Gaza’s water and sewage facilities are partially or completely non-operational due to Israeli attacks on critical water and wastewater infrastructure. As a result, raw sewage has been dumped into the Mediterranean Sea, polluting the sea and contributing to water-borne diseases.

As the conflict spreads across the region, some fear that Israel could target Iran’s oil infrastructure, which Weir said could cause massive fires and significant damage to the air, soil and water that would extend to neighboring countries.

There are few mechanisms to hold countries accountable for environmental destruction during war, although there are several countries insist that ecocide becomes an international crime.

For individuals, the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, considers it a war crime to cause serious environmental damage that is “manifestly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct general military advantage expected.”

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Mazin Qumsiyeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, says Israel is committing genocide and deliberately making Gaza unlivable – an accusation made by South Africa in an ongoing case at the UN Supreme Court .

Israel has repeatedly denied such allegations and opposed the findings of some human rights groups.

“Some of [the damage] will be repairable, but some of it will not be repairable,” Qumsiyeh said. “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.

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“All the laboratories in Gaza have obviously been destroyed, so we have no chance to use an internal laboratory.”

The destruction of agricultural land is also devastating Gaza’s economy, halting food exports and eliminating one of its biggest sources of jobs, he said.

In addition to the ecological and economic devastation, Qumsiyeh says the disaster is also culturally devastating for the Palestinian people. The area that includes both the Palestinian territories and Israel was one of the first in the world to develop agriculture thousands of years ago.

“The devastation is beyond comprehension, not only because of the economic aspect, but also because of the social fabric and cultural connectivity with the country.”

Qumsiyeh said about a third of the Wadi Gaza nature reserve has also been significantly damaged during the war, including by nearby attacks such as the Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in June, which Palestinian officials said killed at least 274 people and injured 698.

While there is currently no way to measure the impact, he says there will likely be devastation for the animals that live there, including foxes, hyenas and endangered birds of prey and owls.

In addition to the human tragedy, Qumsiyeh says it is “completely crazy” from an environmental point of view to see the war in the Middle East spreading to Lebanon, with little serious discussion about the possibility of diplomacy.

“Wars are catastrophic for the global environment, not just the local environment,” he said. “When we see the hurricanes that are hitting the US right now, it’s all connected.

“These are not isolated issues. We cannot afford any more wars.”