The environmental catastrophe of Israel’s ongoing assault in Palestine has often been overlooked due to the sheer loss of human life the past two years.
Indeed, the many horrific and systemic violations of human rights present the most immediate risks to health and safety.
Should there be an “after” for Gaza or Palestine, collecting the dead and clearing the rubble may very well be the simplest obstacle in their path. The environmental crimes may take decades to recover from — if not longer.
The Ceasefire Facade
While the United States celebrates the promise of an end to the “war” in Gaza, the genocide of Palestinians continues.
The farce began with the announcement of a ceasefire plan that would return Gaza to the conditions preceding the Oct. 7 retaliatory attack in Israel.
In the first 24 hours post ”ceasefire,” Israel killed 35 Palestinians and wounded nearly 100 more.
The next day, after Hamas released Israeli soldiers held captive since 2023, Israel began bombing the enclave again — killing at least seven more.
In further violation of the agreement, Israel has refused to open the Rafah crossing, announced further restrictions on aid, and expressed its intent to continue its complete control over the nearly-destroyed Gaza strip.
What’s happened in Gaza during the past two years has been no more of a war than what colonizers inflicted upon Indigenous nations when they first arrived to the Americas: systemic erasure of infrastructure, history, culture and people by a non-Native military that far outmatches the resistance.
The media’s framing of the failed ceasefire should be a case study in complicity.
While soldiers held captive by Hamas were referred to as “hostages,” men, women and children who have been held without charge in Israeli torture prisons for years were called “detainees.”
The “war” was declared “over” while Palestinians continued to be bombed and murdered.
And if the killing stops, Palestinians face even greater obstacles in rebuilding their lives when so much of their natural resources have been destroyed.
Environmental Crimes
The UN estimated in an environmental impact report released last year that it will take up to 15 years just to clear the 50 million tons of rubble Israel created by carpet-bombing the region.
At the time of the report, the UN estimated that 92% of all residential buildings had been severely damaged or destroyed.
Once the bodies and concrete have been cleared, Palestine faces an ever greater disaster: an ecological crisis that started with Israel’s creation in 1948 and has since greatly escalated.
Israel has seized control of more than half of the land in the Gaza strip. The area they control makes up most of Gaza’s agricultural areas, and the proposed ceasefire agreement allows Israel to keep most of that land.
If Israel ever returns the land to Palestine, much of it will have been already destroyed through acts of environmental terrorism.
Acts of environmental terrorism by Israel against Palestinians predate the genocide of the past two years, and go beyond just the Gaza strip.
Olive trees made up nearly 50% of the livelihood of Palestinians 20 years ago and are intimately tied to the identity of Palestine.
In 2003, attacks against West Bank farmers in Palestine that would continue for years first targeted olive trees hundreds of years old, then turned to younger crops and saplings. That same year, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israeli forces while trying to stop a bulldozer from destroying a home and farm in Gaza.
Another spate of attacks in June 2015 across the West Bank left hundreds of olive and almond farms destroyed. Israeli forces were caught spraying fields in Gaza with herbicides (a war crime) later that year.
In 2020, bulldozers razed thousands of trees in fruit orchards in Bedia, Palestine. A few months later, multiple towns in the West Bank of Palestine were burned, vandalized and their crops destroyed.
In January 2021, the Israeli army raided a village in the West Bank of Palestine, bulldozed thousands of trees, and poisoned cropland, destroying farmlands that supplied jobs to more than 450 women.
In October 2021, illegal land thieves from Israel got help from the Israeli army in destroying 20,000 more trees, 8,000 of which were olive trees, mostly in Tubas, Palestine.
From 2015-2021, the Israeli army and illegal land occupiers destroyed more than 80,000 trees in Palestine. Since 1967, nearly 1 million olive trees have been destroyed.
In 2022, a human rights investigation found that Israel intentionally flooded Gazan crops with wastewater to kill crops and livestock, destroyed croplands through the use of herbicides and pesticides, and used military vehicles to destroy agricultural land.
The destruction of agricultural lands is a violation of the Geneva Conventions as it constitutes an attack on “objects indispensable to the survival of a civilian population.” Extensive destruction of the natural environment constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.
This is a lesson Americans aught to know well: Major revisions were made to international law following the Vietnam War, in which herbicides dispersed over the region caused millions of cases of disease and cancer in the Vietnamese and surrounding civilian population, and claimed up to 400,000 lives of American soldiers stationed there (including my father-in-law).
Beyond chemical warfare, Israeli terrorists intentionally set fires to and physically destroyed hundreds of olive trees and saplings in Al-Khalil, Palestine in repeated acts of environmental and cultural terrorism. Al-Khalil is currently being invaded by illegal aliens from Israel, and is often referred to by its fake Hebrew name, Hebron.
By February 2024, nearly half of all croplands and more than a quarter of all greenhouses in Gaza had been destroyed by Israel. The damage inflicted has been targeted with the intent of starving Palestinians and erasing their identity.
Olive trees centuries older than the nation of Israel cannot simply be replaced overnight. Poisoned land does not become cleansed when it rains. The environmental destruction, absent of continued bombing, will cripple Palestine for generations to come.
It's not incorrect to say that Israel has created a Holocaust of its own. All that remains now is for the IDF to sift sthrough the rubble they have created and find the bodies of the Israeli hostages they themselves killed. The final irony will be the orange Jesus rising from the ashes with a Nobel prize.