Israel’s bloody war in Gaza, now in the midst of a shaky ceasefire, has resulted in more than 60,000 Palestinian deaths by Israeli air strikes, ground invasion, starvation and other means, with many thousands more buried under the rubble. While the media has reported on the loss of human life in the war which followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 240 hostages in southern Israel, another type of destruction has gone virtually unmentioned — the ecocide of the land of Gaza.
Gaza is an arid strip of land, about five miles by 25 miles, but it has always had access to significant water resources. For many years, Israel supplied potable water to Gaza, but on Oct. 7 that supply was shut off. Later, water was allowed to flow again, but only to southern Gaza, in order to force residents to evacuate the north, where Israel said it was targeting Hamas fighters. During the conflict, Israel bombed Gaza’s desalination plants, further restricting the water supply used for both human consumption and crop irrigation.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with journalist and author Fred Pearce, a contributing writer for Yale Environment 360, about his recent article, “As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep.” Here he describes the destructive impact the Israeli invasion has had — not just on the lives of Palestinian residents of Gaza — but on water resources, trees and biodiversity there.
FRED PEARCE: Well, I think everybody, understandably, has been looking at the humanitarian issues in Gaza. The state of the built infrastructure, the massive loss of houses and other buildings and people have looked less at the environmental consequences of the war over the last 16 months. And, you know, the data is a little limited because people have had other priorities. NGOs can’t really operate. Academics are more or less out of business there. But if you piece together what we know, the future is very bleak. It’s not that the place is impossible to live in. I certainly wouldn’t say that, but it’s going to require a lot of restoration. And the restoration, the discussion so far has been about the built environment, but the natural environment is going to require a lot of attention too.
MELINDA TUHUS: So one of the things you wrote about that actually surprised me, I’ve been to the West Bank, but not to Gaza, that it was like a desert. But talk about what the water resources were like before October of 2023.
FRED PEARCE: Well, historically, Gaza has had surprisingly good water resources. Like many desert regions, it’s had quite a lot of water below ground, relatively near the surface, could be tapped by wells and supplied historically by the Wadi Gaza, which flows across the territory. And that’s one reason why there’s been a lot of biodiversity, a lot of wildlife. There are a surprising amount, certainly to make a lot of species, mixture of African species, middle Eastern species, European species, really quite a lot there. But since, 1948, since the exodus of Palestinians from Israel into Gaza, the population has soared and the stresses put on those water resources have become terrible. So over-pumping means that the water tables have gone down and down. Sea water, salty sea water has been invading from the Mediterranean, so the water mains have been increasingly salty.
And while that can be used for irrigating crops to some extent, for drinking water, supplies have had to come from elsewhere. So in recent years, there have been desalination plants built. A pipeline has come in from, or three pipelines in fact have come in from Israel supplying water from the national water grid there. Water situations have been precarious and a large part of the Gaza population until the war had been relying on that.
The war has made things much worse because sewage treatment works are no longer operating. So a lot of sewage is going down into the underground water reserves, so it’s polluting those reserves. The underground water now doesn’t just have salt in it, it now has sewage in it and pathogens and many other things, not to mention heavy metals and so on from munitions and indeed from destruction of buildings above. So there are serious questions now about the long-term viability of that water supply and how it can be cleaned up or how people are going to get water, not just for drinking, but of course also for irrigating their crops, including their tree crops, which are a vital part of people’s livelihoods and indeed culture in Gaza.
MELINDA TUHUS: Can you also talk more about trees, not just necessarily trees for crops, but just the canopy. And in your article you talked about how much of that has also been destroyed.
FRED PEARCE: In recent times, there haven’t been that many natural woodlands in Gaza. But there have been some, and there have been much larger areas of orchards and olive groves which have made Gaza greener than some people would might imagine. But the most recent satellite images collected since the start of the ceasefire that I was able to get access to show that around 80 percent of the trees in Gaza have now gone, including virtually all of the natural trees. What was a not a wholly green environment, but a surprisingly green environment is now much less green. And that poses threats for natural ecosystems, for the water supplies, many of which the surface rainwater was collected by the trees. And for the fruit crop, you know, these are one of the main exports from Gaza in the past. So there are livelihoods issues from the loss of the trees as well as environmental issues.
MELINDA TUHUS: What’s your guess about how people could survive there?
FRED PEARCE: Well, it is going to require a lot of aid and one might say — I speak as a Brit here, not as an American — but since America provided a lot of the armaments that were used in the destruction of Gaza, then maybe America needs to be part of that reconstruction. I don’t think it’s feasible or just or in any way desirable for people to be moved out en masse. That would make life even harder.
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