By Kiley Price / Inside Climate News
The Israel-Hamas war has claimed the lives of more than 30,000 people. Like all armed conflicts, it has also come with an environmental toll.
From shell casings to Israeli bomb fragments, millions of tons of debris now litter the streets of Gaza, while a blanket of dust and toxic ash permeates the air, posing health risks for individuals across the Strip.
Scientists estimate that more than 281,000 tons of carbon dioxide were generated by Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in the first two months of the war, which is “greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations,” reports the Guardian.
The United Nations is currently conducting a comprehensive assessment of the environmental impacts from the conflict in Gaza—a slow-going process as fighting continues.
“Human remains are under the building debris, so sensitive management will be critical,” a spokesperson for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) told Euronews Green.
One of the most evident and pressing environmental catastrophes unfolding in Gaza surrounds clean water—or lack thereof.
Water and War: Historically, Gaza has secured roughly 90 percent of its water from groundwater wells, namely the Coastal Aquifer Basin, which runs along the eastern Mediterranean coast from Egypt through Gaza and into Israel. But much of this supply is “brackish and contaminated due to seawater intrusion, overextraction, and sewage and chemical infiltration,” writes Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and co-authors in a commentary post on the organization’s website.
By mid-October, attacks destroyed desalination plants and cut off access to aquifers in the Gaza Strip, dropping the region’s water production capacity to just 5 percent of typical levels, according to UNICEF. The United Nations estimated late last year that the average individual in Gaza is living on only 3 liters of water per day for drinking, cooking and bathing (for contrast, the average American family uses more than 1,130 liters of water per day at home, according to the EPA).
On top of this, all five of Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants lost power within the first few weeks of the conflict. As a result, sewage has flowed freely through the street, causing a record uptick in cases of diarrheal illnesses, an issue that has only grown worse since I briefly covered it last month.
“Historical marine pollution incidents in Gaza have led to high concentrations of chlorophyll and suspended organic matter in coastal waters, and gastrointestinal parasites: this conflict is likely increasing these issues,” the UNEP spokesperson told Euronews.
Gaza may be facing the brunt of war-related pollution at the moment. However, past evidence shows that Israel’s environmental fate may be closely connected with the territory it is attacking.
Sewage Overflow: Gaza’s sewage infrastructure disaster didn’t happen overnight; years of confrontation between Israel and Hamas have gradually chipped away at this system (Anas Baba and Scott Neuman covered the history of this issue extensively for NPR in December).
In a Tuesday opinion column for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman reflected on a 2018 column he wrote in which he referred to the “third person” in the fight between Israelis and Palestinians: Mother Nature. In the piece, he detailed how Gazans had to discharge rivers of untreated sewage into the Mediterranean Sea—and stressed that this sludge knows no borders.
“Because of the prevailing current, most of that sewage flows northward to the Israeli beach town of Ashkelon, the site of Israel’s second-biggest desalination plant,” Friedman wrote in 2018. “Gaza’s waste is floating into Ashkelon’s desalination plant, and the plant has had to close several times to clean Gaza’s gunk out of its filters.”
History may soon be repeating itself: Without wastewater treatment infrastructure in Gaza, at least 100,000 cubic meters of sewage and wastewater are being discharged on land or into the Mediterranean Sea daily, according to UNEP estimates.
This is “renewing pollution threats to the intake of desalination plants in Israel,” writes Hall and co-authors for CSIS. “All the region’s water and wastewater sources cross into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza alike. Both populations have an interest in tackling the crisis before it further undermines environmental and public health.”
Though not tied to war, this type of cross-border sewage problem is happening in the U.S., as well. Spanning from Mexico to California before reaching the ocean, the Tijuana River carries millions—sometimes billions—of gallons of untreated wastewater across the border each day. This onslaught commonly overwhelms California’s and, more often, Tijuana’s sewage treatment plants, particularly during storms, an issue I reported on in February.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Kiley Price
Kiley Price is a science journalist who focuses on biodiversity, fisheries, ocean health and climate change. She earned her master’s degree at New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Previously, Kiley earned her bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in journalism at Wake Forest University, where she spent a month in Thailand reporting on the intersection of Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement as a Pulitzer Fellow. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Mongabay, Yale Environment 360 and more.