Environmental destruction in Gaza is a calculated military strategy. By poisoning the land and water, Israel is ensuring a permanent and toxic genocide.
“Seen from the point of view of colonial history, climate transformation is not the accidental and indirect consequence of conflict; the environment is not the collateral damage of history, but a tool in its arsenal of transformations, a form of government over land, peoples and the relation between them, the environment is one of the means by which colonial racism is enacted, land is grabbed, siege lines fortified and violence perpetuated.” - Shourideh C. Molavi
The zionist ethnostate’s recent pause in hostilities against the people of Gaza due to so-called Phase 1 of President Trump’s 20 Point Gaza Peace Plan has resulted in a collective sigh of relief for many the world over, who have observed and/or have been victims of the ongoing genocidal onslaught that’s pillaged an estimated 70,000 lives, including approximately 20,000 women and children, included the use of starvation as a weapon, and has reduced the Gaza Strip to rubble as critical infrastructure including homes, schools/universities, hospitals and places of worship have all been decimated by the Israel Occupying Force’s (IOF) war machine that has been aided, abetted, and funded by the United States and other Western governments.
Yet this sigh of relief cannot be considered the same thing as the ability to rest easy and breathe as the current ceasefire between the zionist ethnostate and the Palestinian Resistance is nothing more than an ephemeral enterprise due to the continued presence of the IOF in Gaza, as well as there being no reason to believe that indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and his henchmen of zionist zealots including, but not limited to, Israel Finance Minister, Bazalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, have any intention of giving up their stated goals to complete a “Greater Israel” conquest that includes a final ethnic cleansing solution for Palestinian people in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank while rejecting any notion of a free and fully independent Palestinian state. And when it comes to the ability for the Palestinians to breathe, safely, at all, the zionist ethnostate’s bellicose and barbaric machinations have all but made this essential human function impossible for many years to come.
To this end, there are myriad reasons why Trump’s 20-point plan is arbitrary, capricious and, in total, illegitimate. From the fact that no Palestinians were even involved in drafting a plan for their future, thereby continuing to deny them self-determination and agency, to the omission of a clear determination of Palestinian statehood as the ultimate conclusion. Yet it's the lack of accountability and calls for the prosecution of actors, including but not limited to, Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Marco Rubio, and others, for their roles in aiding, funding, and perpetuating myriad documented war crimes undertaken by the zionist ethnostate that, arguably, stands out the most. Yet for all the crimes including, “starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024,” issued against the zionist ethnostate at the behest of Netanyahu, crimes not included by the International Criminal Court, nor discussed as part of the larger lexicon regarding the wanton aggression against Gaza is that of intentional and systemic environmental warfare against the people of Palestine.
The use of environmental warfare as a primary tool of settler colonialism and genocide is nothing new - the praxis has, in fact, been used for centuries. Christoper Columbus and subsequent conquistadors from Cortez to Pizarro employed a slash, burn, and land alteration campaign against peoples indigenous to Turtle Island (present-day North America), which was accentuated by a biological warfare pogrom through the unintentional and intentional use of disease to wipe out and vastly reduce entire populations. Biological warfare was consciously utilized during the so-called French and Indian wars between 1754 and 1767 , when smallpox was also used as a biological weapon by the commander of Fort Pitt, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, who, under the direction of General Jeffery Amherst, ordered soldiers to distribute blankets that had been used by smallpox patients with the intent of initiating outbreaks among Indigenous peoples. It’s estimated that the resulting epidemic killed more than 50% of people in infected tribes.
As author Shourideh Moldavi notes in her book, Environmental Warfare in Gaza, “Destruction and control of environmental infrastructures has repeatedly moved from being a tactic of war or collateral damage, to an end in itself.” She continues, “Environmental infrastructure wars - operations that involved the systematic destruction of energy, sanitation, gas, oil, water, and water supplies and systems - are increasingly applied in the Middle East and North Africa.” Moldavi’s assertions are accurate, though she omits the use of environmental warfare in Asia by colonial powers, as well as domestic environmental warfare that’s been waged against domestic populations, specifically Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people, in the United States for decades, as this article will explain.
As historian Joachim Radkau notes, “the chief problem of colonialism seems to have been not so much its immediate ecological consequences as its long-term impact, the full extent of which became apparent only centuries later, in the era of modern technology, and many times only after the colonial states had acquired their independence.” While we agree with Radaku’s overarching thesis, it’s also important to note that the full extent of environmental warfare consequences are also felt less than centuries later. In many cases, adverse impacts to public health and physical environments are surfaced and realized acutely and chronically sustained, which further makes the case that ecocide is a tool and result of genocide.
For instance, during the Vietnam War the use of chemical warfare had one of the most dramatic, long-lasting effects on combatants and civilians ever documented. The U.S. Army’s use of the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange during the infamous Operation Ranch Hand, where over 19 million gallons of toxic herbicide was sprayed over approximately 6.4 million acres of South Vietnam, resulted in numerous deaths and myriad impacts to public health that are still being documented. When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage as vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once serving as critical habitat for rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. And forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses.
Biologist and self-described bioethicist, Professor Arthur W. Galston, coined the term “ecocide” at the 1970 Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington, D.C. to characterize massive damage and destruction of ecosystems. During the conference, Gaston, who identified the defoliant effects of the chemicals found in Agent Orange, proposed a new international agreement to ban ecocide. This effort was compounded by Sweden’s then Prime Minister, Olof Palme, who referenced events occurring in Vietnam as “ecocide” during his opening speech at the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The conference led to the development and adoption of the Stockholm Declaration. Following the Vietnam War, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination of Minorities proposed adding “ecocide” to the Genocide Convention, and even prepared a study to make its case. The proposal was ultimately rejected in 1978 despite a direct request by UN Special Rapporteur on genocide, Benjamin Whitaker, to add ‘ecocide’ to the Genocide Convention. This rejection would have consequences that are felt to this day and may have also contributed to engendering a new tactic in the larger environmental warfare playbook as contemporary wars not only utilized chemicals on fauna/vegetation, but directly on human populations through the use of advanced weaponry that contain toxic chemicals, resulting in deleterious impacts to public health and physical environments contemporaneously.
According to a report released by the National Library of Medicine in 2021, “The US military first deployed depleted uranium (DU) weapons in Iraq during the Gulf War in 1990 and in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” The report goes on to say, “Research funded by the U.S. government has denied the health risks posed by DU to the Iraqi population, while opponents have claimed that DU is responsible for increased rates of birth defects and cancers in Iraq.” And while the United States and other major actors who perpetuated the Iraq war, including the United Kingdom, deny claims that their weapons have induced chronic health impacts, according to a piece released in March 2025 by the outlet, Military.com, “For the first time ever, researchers have detected uranium in the bones of living Fallujah residents, high levels of lead in residents of previously bombarded neighborhoods, and a significant number of birth defects in babies born to those in the city.”
And Kali Rubaii, an assistant professor in the anthropology department at Purdue University, vindicated the research, noting, "What we are finding in the environment, in the body, is the sheer permanence of war's effects [and] in an interesting way, we measured that with numbers." Moreover, according to the same piece, a study supported by Brown University's Costs of War Project, indicates that Fallujah's population has seen a 17-fold increase in birth defects and anomalies since 2003. Using a special bone scan known as X-ray fluorescence, or XRF, the researchers found uranium in the bones of 29% of study participants. And the scans also showed lead contamination in 100% of those tested, at rates 600% higher than average U.S. rates.
The U.S., of course, is no stranger to administering chemical warfare against its own residents. In Flint, Michigan, a majority Black city whose primary water sources were purposely contaminated with lead after a clean water supply was replaced by the contaminated Flint River. An act so sinister and draconian that pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who brought the Flint situation to the world’s attention, proclaimed, “If you were going to put something in a population to keep them down for generations to come, it would be lead.” And the world over is aware of the ignominious situation in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, a majority Black populated stretch of the state that holds this sobriquet due to the fact that it houses 25% of the nation’s petrochemical and oil refinery operations that have resulted in elevated rates and risks of maternal, reproductive, and newborn health harms, cancer, and respiratory ailments. Parts of Cancer Alley have the highest risk of cancer from industrial air pollution in the United States.
But if the United States and their Western acolytes commenced the utilization of ecocide as part of a larger colonial conquest and maintenance of empire in the 1970s and early 2000s as part of a larger campaign of slow-genocide against its Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white residents, the zionist ethnostate has perfected a practice of instituting an accelerated ecocidal/genocidal matrix as part of its military campaigns against Palestine that irrefutably proves that the IOF is nothing more than a chemical warfare brigade. According to report E-003481 produced by the European Parliament, “There is now enough convincing data to prove that Israel has repeatedly used depleted uranium weaponry.” The report further notes, “The lethal effects of radioactivity caused by explosions and subsequent fires, including cancer of the lungs and pleura, can persist for centuries in the environment and particularly in aquifers. We are therefore on the verge of another humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine and in particular in the Gaza Strip, where thousands of tons of depleted uranium bombs were dropped with the effects that have already been documented.”
Reporter, Samira Homerang Saunders, described the entire situation as “Gaza’s Toxic Biosphere,” in her piece entitled, Environmental devastation and the war on Palestine provided the following insights into the zionist ethnostate’s concentrated and intentional use of ecocide as part of a larger ethnic cleansing initiative:
- According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, within just two months in 2023, Israel dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza, where over two million people live confined to a space half the size of Hiroshima. The impact of constant bombing, including the use of white phosphorus in Gaza and Southern Lebanon, is of an unprecedented magnitude;
- In November [2023], Israeli shells incinerated 40,000 olive trees in Southern Lebanon. Over the previous month, its bombs burned through almost 3.5 million square metres of oak, lemon and banana trees, grasslands and shrublands, a cultural, spiritual and agricultural disaster;
- Gaza’s water supplies are under the stringent control of the Israeli government, as documented and condemned repeatedly by major international bodies, including the UN and Amnesty International. Before the current attack, up to 96 per cent of drinking water in Gaza was designated unfit for human consumption; and
- When Israel cut off all supplies to the strip in October, it rendered all three of its desalination plants inoperable. In the south, where the majority of the population has been forced to flee, all of the water wells and sewage pumping stations have ceased functioning. The choice for Gazans is either death by direct military violence, or death by dehydration, starvation and/or disease.
The emissions generated by the zionist ethnostate’s war machine in itself must be qualified as an ongoing war crime. According to a 2024 article by Philippe Pernot, “The greenhouse gas emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations, according to a British-American study,” which is the estimated equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tons of coal. Pernot also notes, “The UN further stated that Israeli bombardments have created 37 million tons of debris.”
To this end, many Gazans are returning to their homes after nearly two years of bombings and chemical warfare that rendered their lands and water sources into toxic cesspools, preventing them from growing and cultivating crops, and are now walking into open-air graveyards waiting for those who will later succumb to diseases and ailments ranging from cancer to terminal complications associated with damaged respiratory systems. Exposure to smoke and particulates from the debris will surely increase the already unacceptable and deplorable death toll at the hands of the zionist ethnostate. As Princeton University professor, Robert Jisung Park points out in his book, Slow Burn, “Recent research suggests that the hidden health costs of the smoke alone may vastly exceed the direct destruction and death from US wildfires,” and, “Across a range of studies, it is estimated that PM2.5 pollution is responsible for anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 premature deaths in the United States alone.”
And while wildfires are certainly destructive, they pale in comparison to the incessant dropping of 2,000-pound bombs and munitions from tanks and other military equipment. Park also says that smoke both lingers in the air and can travel long distances, “Indeed, satellite imagery suggests that smoke can carry long distances: very long distances. Smoke plumes from fires in the Pacific Northwest can have measurable effects on air quality in New York or Boston.” So what does this say about how far the IOF’s emissions can travel - certainly as far as the Occupied West Bank, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and even Haifa. This is ironic, as Park even discusses impacts of smoke exposure in Israel, “…similarly, studies of Israeli students taking important exams across more polluted and less polluted days suggest that highly polluted days—for instance, a day with an [air quality index] above 100—reduces test performance by roughly 15 percent of a standard deviation and may even affect the kinds of colleges that students are ultimately admitted to.” This in itself exposes how sadistic the zionist ethnostate is, as its willingness to sacrifice its own people to maintain and expand its empire mimics what its main financial and military backer, the United States, does to its own domestic population in communities like Cancer Alley and Flint to sustain and expand its own empire.
Policies that undermine the ability of human populations to realize sustainable needs from the biosphere must be seen as a fundamental violation of human rights because, without the ability to sustain life, all of the other rights- housing, food, education, and healthcare- become moot. To this end, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) indictments of Netanyahu are incomplete in that far more people, including IOF soldiers, such as those who recently documented themselves incinerating one of Gaza’s remaining sewage treatment plants while retreating to the so-called Yellow Line buffer zone included as part of Trump’s 20-point plan, must also be indicted. Moreover, the ICC’s current indictment makes no mention of numerous instances of ecocide against the Palestinian people, which runs counter to a recent opinion of the International Court of Justice that holds, “States have an obligation to protect the environment from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and act with due diligence and cooperation to fulfill this obligation.” The opinion further stipulates, “if States breach these obligations, they incur legal responsibility and may be required to cease the wrongful conduct, offer guarantees of non-repetition and make full reparation depending on the circumstances.” Furthermore, nation states that have their own ecocide laws must not remain silent on this issue or risk being seen as tartufferous as nations like the United States which allow the zionist ethnostate to continue committing numerous crimes against humanity and the planet alike with qualified immunity.
The zionist ethnostate must be held to account for past, current, and future damage to Palestinian lands, Palestinian public health, and violations that are even putting its own citizens at risk. Because, for all the money it will take to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure, the amount of redress required for turning Palestinian lands and bodies into spheres of toxicity, that will likely be felt for generations, may very well be unquantifiable while also rendering the very idea of accountability obsolete. To this end, the larger initiative of Palestinian Liberation cannot be realized without tribunals that lead to prosecutions and life sentences for perpetrators of ecocide and genocide not seen on this scale since the 15th and 16th centuries.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
In this week’s segment, we examine claims of a genocide against Christians in the African nation of Nigeria, and the geopolitical strategems behind the narrative. But first, we discuss the election…
Lance Hawkins joins us from New York City to discuss the recent election of Zohran Mamdani, who will take office as the mayor of New York City on January 1. Lance Hawkins is a community, labor, and…
David Hundeyin is a Nigerian investigative journalist, bestselling author, and founder of West Africa Weekly, an independent Pan-African digital news publication focusing on West Africa and the Sahel…
New Yorkers experienced some democracy with Zohran Mamdani's victory in the mayor's race and are inspiring voters across the country to believe that change is possible. But the outcome is a challenge…
“Black Brazilians have been suffering … since the establishment of slavery more than 400 years ago.”
