Wadi Gaza is the estuary of Nahal Besor, a stream mentioned in the Bible. It flows west from Hebron in the West Bank, through Israeli territory and on through Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, after 18 months of war, Wadi Gaza is characterized by “pollution from debris, wastewater, corpses, ammunition, and explosives,” in the words of Nada Majdalani, the Palestinian director of EcoPeace Middle East.
Nevertheless, spring is still the migration season in Israel and Palestine. This region forms a narrow land bridge joining Europe, Asia, and Africa, marking one of the world’s busiest flight paths for an estimated 500 million birds. Many of them — flamingos, herons, storks, cranes — land in Wadi Gaza, one of the few natural preserves in the Gaza Strip, which grew into one of the most densely populated areas in the world over the last two decades because of Israeli restrictions.
Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
This is the driest region in the world for the number of people it supports, and water scarcity is getting worse because it’s also warming around twice as fast as the global average. Eighty percent of Israel’s drinking water comes from ocean desalination. In Gaza, seawater intrusion has contaminated once-abundant underground reservoirs because of overpumping. While Israel and other powers in the region continue to practice resource hoarding and ecological destruction, there is also a small, stubborn movement of transboundary environmentalist peacebuilders, who have persisted throughout the current war.
Organizations like EcoPeace, the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and A Land For All — all three with shared Palestinian and Israeli leadership — have been working collectively for decades toward a vision that centers fair, shared stewardship of natural resources and sustainable development as the basis of lasting peace. And they persevere even now, after Israel violated a several-week ceasefire in March with another round of bombings, killings, and cutting off of aid to Gaza, and when the prevailing political messaging, according to Arava’s Barak Talmor, “has gotten so polarized that cultivating empathy or sympathy between the sides is increasingly challenging.”
Water-based environmental and health risks travel across borders, just like Nahal Besor. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, an Israeli citizen and doctor of Palestinian descent, advises A Land For All, a political group that advocates for a two-state confederation. She was working at a hospital in southern Israel in the first few months of the war. There, she treated Israeli soldiers suffering from dysentery and rare fungal infections attributable to drinking the water in Gaza. “In Israel and Palestine, what we see is that our lives are so intertwined with each other,” she said. “The health of Palestinians affects the health of Israelis and vice versa. And the best example is water.”
Elaine Donderer / Arava Institute for Environmental Studies
This fact can sometimes force compromise. The environmental nonprofit EcoPeace Middle East was able to leverage the health-water connection to bring modern wastewater treatment to Gaza before the war. EcoPeace had Israeli beaches tested just north of Gaza, and found e.coli contamination in the sand. A technician at the lab also tipped them off that untreated solid waste from Gaza was clogging and shutting down an Israeli desalination facility.
“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu himself quoted one of our reports in a statement in 2014, saying that if the sewage crisis of Gaza threatens Israel’s water security, we have to deal with it,” said Gidon Bromberg, EcoPeace’s Israeli co-founder and co-director. Four plants ultimately opened in Gaza by 2022, enabling Gazans and Israelis alike to more safely swim in the ocean; they sustained severe damage during the war.
Even after the October 7 attack of Hamas on Israel, Bromberg said, they were able to invoke the same principle of shared health destiny after Israel shut off the three water pipes supplying Gaza’s highest-quality drinking water. EcoPeace got leading Israeli public health experts to sign a letter saying, “You’re going to see lots of disease, and it’s not going to just stop in Gaza.”
“That was very effective,” he said. “It broadens the zero-sum thinking into an understanding that this is lose-lose.”
Within the first week, one drinking water pipeline was reopened, and eventually all three. (More recently, in March 2025, Israel cut power to two of Gaza’s desalination plants, once again imposing water scarcity as a weapon; EcoPeace is responding by lobbying the government).
Anya Kamentz / Grist
The environmental situation today in Gaza is worse than ever. The war has left an estimated 40 million tons of rubble and 900,000 tons of toxic waste from demolished buildings in Gaza, according to a recent report from the Arava Institute; not to mention, once again, a growing amount of raw sewage. The World Health Organization warns that infectious disease, arising from water scarcity, could kill more Gazan people than Israeli bombs, and researchers are concerned about new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that thrive where soap and water washing is scarce.
Barak Talmor is the project manager of Arava Institute’s Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza project, one attempt to respond to these conditions. The educational and research institute, in its first foray into direct humanitarian aid, raised money and convened a coalition to bring some of the off-grid sustainable technologies developed there and elsewhere into Gaza. These include Laguna, a solar-powered water treatment unit the size of a large dumpster that uses algae to filter sewage; WaterGen, machines that pull potable water out of the air; off-grid desalination units, and a biodigester that turns sewage gas into cooking gas. These were designated to supply a refugee camp in Khan Younis and a hospital. But approval took months, and the donated equipment is currently sitting in warehouses and at the border thanks to yet another stop on aid. “If I have any gray hair, it’s from the past year,” Talmor said.
Despite these harsh realities, members of EcoPeace, Arava, and A Land For All say that their shared commitment to sustainability has enabled them to keep cross-border relationships strong. This is itself a challenge when any hint of “normalization” or Israeli-Palestinian dialogue is denigrated by what Bromberg calls “spoilers” on both sides.
Abdullah Khateeb is part of a new generation of Palestinian environmentalist peacebuilders, and he said it’s a lonely path, especially since the war. “I cannot tell my family that I’m meeting Israelis. I cannot tell the Israeli people that my community wants to throw you to the sea. It’s kind of living two lives, basically, and you have to hide it perfectly in order to survive.”
Khateeb had never left the West Bank three years ago when he was accepted for a semester at Arava Institute, studying environmental science in the south of Israel alongside fellow Palestinians, Israeli, and Jordanian students. He said he applied solely to get past the checkpoints and see a little more of the world. “I didn’t care about the environment, about peace, about anything like that. Arava attracted me with the free food, the swimming pool. And once I was there, miracles happened.”
Khateeb, by chance, recognized one of his Israeli classmates. She had once been a soldier guarding his village. Through the Arava Institute’s moderated weekly dialogue sessions, they listened to each others’ experiences and forged a friendship. Now, he’s traveled to Northern Ireland and to England to engage in dialogue alongside Israeli peace activists. And after earning degrees in civil and water engineering, he now interns with Laguna, which has two of its off-grid sewage treatment units installed in the West Bank. He’s working on better methods for converting the solids into cooking gas.
“Water apartheid” is visible here in the West Bank in the storage tanks seen only on Palestinian roofs; they are forced to purchase drinking water, while nearby Israelis in illegal settlements copiously irrigate their crops. For Khateeb, “Peacebuilding is not only about dialogue. It’s also political, financial, educational, and technological. That’s why I work on water and environment. It offers opportunities. Everyone likes new innovations.”
Bromberg, an attorney, founded EcoPeace alongside Jordanian, Egyptian, and Palestinian environmentalists in the mid-1990s. Back then, their plan was to team up to prevent rapid overdevelopment that was expected in the wake of the Oslo Accords bringing peace and with it, increased tourism to the region. Needless to say, that did not come to pass, and EcoPeace’s mission pivoted from pursuing environmentalism post-peace, to modeling peace through environmentalism. (The Egyptians pulled out in the late 1990s under pressure from President Hosni Mubarak).
As environmentalists, he said, “We’re all coming from a technical position where we strongly understand that borders are man-made. We have to look at watersheds and water basins. There, borders just get in the way.” During the second Intifada in the early 2000s, they launched the Good Water Neighbors project. Ultimately, 28 communities on either side of rivers and streams in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan, cooperated in campaigns to preserve the bodies of water that both divided and united them.
After October 7, Bromberg and his counterparts in Jordan and Palestine made a pact to talk every day, to combat the misinformation that was inundating all sides. “We had staff in all of our offices lose family members in the war. One of our Ramallah staff lost 100 members of his extended family.” he said. They also lost a colleague in Gaza, a consultant. “It’s been a nightmare.”
One that has recently resumed. “Every day you open your eyes, and you wonder whether you’re on the right track or not,” said Nada Majdalani, the Palestinian director of EcoPeace. “But then we confront ourselves with — if this is not the way to do it, then what else? We don’t accept the status quo. And we need to bring out a different narrative to each other. What we all really want for us and for our children in the future is peace and stability.”
What keeps her going, she said, are the thousands of students, teachers, young professionals, and other stakeholders that are “walking the path” alongside them.
Their educational programs are more popular than ever. And all three EcoPeace directors were in Washington, DC in a March meeting with the State Department and members of Congress about sustainable development plans for a railway, expanded renewable energy, and a new Gaza port.
“We share the understanding that this war will end and we all have a responsibility to ensure we stop the suffering,” said Bromberg.
While she doesn’t like many of the statements of the Trump administration in relation to Gaza, Majdalani said, “The important part is not to shut down the opportunity for communication. But try to find an opening where we can actually put on the table ideas which bring interest to all parties.”
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