After the War, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep

Scientist Ahmed Hilles, head of the National Institute for Environment and Development, a leading Palestinian think tank, last week called for an international fact-finding committee “to assess the damage and lay the basis for environmental restoration and long-term recovery.” He said it should “prioritize the rehabilitation of water sources, soil remediation, and the restoration of agricultural lands.”

The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot where wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa meet. It has boasted more than 250 bird species and 100 mammal species, from wild cats and wolves to mongooses and mole rats, according to research conducted over the past two decades by the foremost expert on the territory’s fauna and flora, Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou of the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City.

Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves. “The shallow sand wells provided an ample supply of the sweet life-giving water,” says Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, which advocates for peace through diplomacy on water. This water, overlain by fertile soils, was why so many Palestinians fled to Gaza after being expelled from their homes by militias following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

But Gaza’s population has since soared to more than 2 million inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth — it vies with Singapore, but without the high-rises. That has put immense pressure on the underground water. Extraction prior to the war was more than three times greater than recharge from rainfall and seepage from the Wadi Gaza, which had dwindled due to dams upstream in Israel.

As water tables fall, salty seawater has infiltrated the aquifer. By 2023, more than 97 percent of Gaza’s once-sweet underground water was unfit for drinking, according to the World Health Organization. Increasingly, well water has been restricted to irrigating crops. Public water supplies have come largely from seawater desalination plants built with international aid, augmented by water delivered from Israel through three cross-border pipelines.

But since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action. Output from water-supply wells had fallen by more than a half, and desalination plants lacked power, while Israel had reduced deliveries down the pipelines. A survey found that only 14 percent of households still relied on public supplies. Most were taking water from potentially contaminated open wells or unregulated private tankers. In September, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, charged that limiting access to clean water “is clearly employed as a weapon in Gaza against [the] Palestinian civil population.”

Israel denies this. “The IDF does not aim to inflict excessive damage to civilian infrastructure,” an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said, “and strikes exclusively on the grounds of military necessity and in strict accordance with international law.” It cites cases where it says Hamas has stored weapons and launched attacks from such water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the fate of the once-abundant underground water — the lifeline for both human and natural life — hangs by a thread. With most wells currently out of use for irrigated agriculture, withdrawals from the aquifer may have been reduced. But the war has increased contamination of what water remains.

The threats are various. UNEP warns that Israeli efforts to use seawater to flood the estimated 300 miles of underground tunnels Hamas has dug beneath Gaza could be contaminating the groundwaters beneath. (The IDF has said on social media that it “takes into consideration the soil and water systems in the area” before flooding tunnels.) Meanwhile, sewage treatment has all but ceased, with facilities either destroyed by military action or disabled by lack of power. Even the solar panels installed at some treatment works have reportedly been destroyed.

Raw sewage and wastewater spills across the land and into water courses or the Mediterranean — up to 3.5 million cubic feet every day, according to UNEP. The porous soils in most of Gaza mean sewage discharged onto the land readily seeps into underground water reserves. “The crisis threatens long-term environmental damage as contaminants seep into groundwater,” says the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The marine environment is also choking in sewage. In 2022 Israeli environmentalist Gidon Bromberg, who heads EcoPeace Middle East, a transnational NGO, persuaded Israeli security authorities to allow Gaza to import cement to build new three sewage treatment plants along the shoreline. The work was completed, and the following summer both Palestinians and Israelis could, for the first time in many years, swim safely from their respective Mediterranean beaches without encountering Gaza’s raw sewage. Fish returned and a Mediterranean monk seal was recorded for the first time ever off Gaza. But by the start of 2024, a few months after the war began, the plants were all out of action and satellite images showed plumes of sewage spewing into the sea.

The destruction of the built environment in Gaza is also a threat to the natural environment. U.N. agencies estimate the war has created more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials, and unexploded ordnance. Meanwhile, the collapse of waste collection services has resulted in a proliferation of makeshift dumps — 141, according to a UNDP count in October — while open-air waste burning regularly sends black smoke and hazardous pollutants through densely populated areas.

Some international lawyers argue that Israel is guilty of war crimes against the natural environment in Gaza as much as against its people. The Geneva Convention prohibits warfare that may cause “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.” All three terms provoke debate about their precise meaning. The IDF said its actions are proportionate and are justified by military needs and within international law. But Bagheri said, “The destruction of the natural environment in Gaza is now very well documented. It is not collateral or incidental, but deliberate.”

Before the conflict, cultivation covered more than a third of Gaza. But by September, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizaton assessed that two-thirds of farmland had been badly damaged. Analyses of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Goldsmiths’ College, part of the University of London, dedicated to exposing “state and corporate violence,” found that more than 2,000 farms, greenhouses, and other agricultural sites had been destroyed, “often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.”

The IDF said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land and seeks to mitigate environmental impact,” but that “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land”. Yet there are growing concerns that the damage — in particular from the removal of trees — could prove permanent.

Tree loss has been examined in detail by He Yin, a geographer who heads the remote sensing and land science laboratory at Kent State University. He shared with Yale Environment 360 his latest assessment of satellite images.

Before the war, trees covered around a third of the cultivated area, he says. By late September, 67 percent of them had been damaged. But by January 21, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, that figure had risen to 80 percent, with losses exceeding 90 percent in northern Gaza. Prior to the conflict there were some natural trees, says Yin. “But I would say they are pretty much all gone now.”

There are two likely causes of tree loss: displaced residents cutting down trees for firewood, and the Israeli military bombarding and uprooting trees to eliminate cover for Hamas fighters and clear security buffer zones around the edge of Gaza.

With most farms covering less than two acres, “the loss of a single tree can be devastating” for farmers’ future fruit harvests, says Yin. But the environmental implications of tree loss could also prove permanent and devastating for future generations. UNEP says that uprooting by military equipment “has moved, mixed and thinned the topsoil cover over large areas.” This, it says, “will impact future cultivation [and] make the land vulnerable to desertification.”

All this is bad news not just for people, but for wildlife. The space for nature to flourish in Gaza is very limited. Still, long-term research by Abd Rabou found that, despite human population pressures, some species have revived in recent years. After the abandonment of a series of Israeli settlements in the territory in 2005, “dozens of Arabian wolf [sic] and other carnivores crept intermittently through gaps in the border to the east of the Gaza Strip.”

Animals dug burrows beneath Israel’s security fences to reach domestic livestock and poultry, as well as small prey living in waste dumps and sewage treatment plants.

But there are natural attractions for wildlife too. The Wadi Gaza, which bisects the territory, is an important stopover for migrating water birds, including herons, storks, flamingos, and raptors, as well as home to the Palestine sunbird, the territory’s national bird. The wadi’s attraction continues even though it has suffered badly in recent decades from both upstream water diversions and sewage discharged from refugee camps.

Still, in 2000, the Palestinian Authority made the wadi the territory’s only nature reserve, and in 2022, work began on a $50-million U.N. project to reduce pollution and restore its ecology.

The start of the war halted that work. And over the past 15 months, the wadi has again become a running sewer and dumping ground. “Top of my concerns for Wadi Gaza are pollution from debris, wastewater, corpses, ammunition, and explosives,” says Nada Majdalani, the Palestine director of EcoPeace Middle East.

Another ill-fated Gazan ecological treasure is Al-Mawasi, a narrow fertile strip of sand dunes near the border with Egypt. Once, Al-Mawasi was thinly populated and rich in wildlife attracted by miniature wetlands that form amid the dunes where the underground water surfaces. Abd Rabou has recorded 135 bird species there, including many Palestine sunbirds, as well as 14 species of mammals and 20 of reptiles.

But early in the war, the IDF designated Al-Mawasi a “safe zone” for people fleeing its bombardment of nearby towns. Hundreds of thousands sought shelter amid the dunes. Then, last July, the IDF began bombing the enclave, in pursuit of Hamas fighters. This redoubled the damage to the fragile ecosystem. Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.

Currently, most information about the state of Gaza’s natural environment comes from such remote sensing imagery. Detailed ground observations are rare. It has been unsafe, and even with a ceasefire, NGOs have other priorities. Meanwhile, academic life has been shattered by the war. Much of the Islamic University of Gaza, including Abd Rabou’s biology department, was destroyed in the first days of the conflict.

With or without a restored campus, it may be a while before peer-reviewed literature on the state of nature in Gaza resumes. When I contacted Abd Rabou by email in January to discuss his work, he sent a swift reply. “Now I am not able to communicate at all,” he wrote, “because five of my children were lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and my house was completely destroyed.”