Israel’s strategy of ecocide
Israel's strategy of ecocidal warfare in Gaza
by David Whyte
Presentation to the Gaza Tribunal, Istanbul, 24th October 2025.
Attacks on environmental infrastructure are undoubtedly a conscious part of the Israeli military strategy in Gaza. By environmental infrastructure, I mean infrastructure that ensures the integrity and cleanliness of land, water, air and biodiversity, including agriculture and drinking water.
Removing the capacity of the people of Gaza to produce drinkable and useable water has been a central part of Israel’s war effort. The destruction of wter treatment plants and the release of huge amounts of raw sewage every day has contaminated land and water courses, including aquifer and the Mediterranean coast, ensuring disease proliferation. Destruction of agricultural land – including the deliberate destruction of almost all of Gaza’s orchards and most of its arable land, as well as the targeting of fishing grounds and the capacity to fish, has also been part of a sustained and deliberate attempt to render Gaza unliveable.
The ecocide in Gaza cannot in any sense be thought of as distinct from the genocide.
Ecocide is a central part of the military strategy.
In this ecocide/genocide the annihilation of the Palestinian people is indivisible from the destruction of Palestinian land fertility, air quality, food sources and water supplies that people rely upon to live.
Israel fires on and bombs food queues, water infrastructure and sanitation plants for this reason, just as it destroys agricultural production and fishing boats and nets for this reason.
Israel has repeatedly justified such attacks by claiming that Hamas uses civilian resources for military purposes. According to Israeli officials, Hamas hides weapons in, or launches attacks from, civilian locations and even aid convoys. Thus, all of the infrastructure that sustains life is transformed into a legitimate military target.
It is here that we see the articulation of a principle that has been central to the genocide/ecocide: that there is a symbiosis between civilian and military targets to the point that – the Israeli state argues – it is pointless, and at times, counterproductive, to separate them. If the analysis of ecocide in previous military conflicts revealed a blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants, the Israeli state has wholly eradicated this distinction for its own political and military operational purposes.
The open declaration that all life be treated as a legitimate target can only be understood as a supreme declaration of racism. Palestinians must be categorised, and treated as a homogenous and expendable ‘terrorist’ population. Palestinians must be racialised to the point that Palestinian lives are seen as nothing more an inconvenient but expendable obstacle to achieving a military goal.
Whilst this is by no means unique in warfare, Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has perhaps seen the highest point at which the destruction of civilian targets – hospitals, water treatment plants, farms, schools and universities – is openly boasted about and justified by its perpetrators.
Israel’s explicit justifications for a scorched-earth military strategy raise profound questions about why this strategy has been tolerated or sustained by the most powerful international states. It also raises further questions about the supine nature of the structures of international law to prevent this genocide/ecocide and about the real politic of Israel’s brutality.
Historically, Israel has been an important channel for both European and US geo-political interests in the Middle East. The attack on Gaza cannot be described as a war for oil. Yet, the Israeli war machine is only sustained because oil is in the Middle East. The attack on Gaza is therefore inextricably bound up with oil and gas interests. This is a crucial entry point into understanding the attacks on Gaza as part of a longer, ecocidal, military campaign.
I now want to set out some measures of the deliberate destruction of environmental infrastructure.
Debris
- The large-scale destruction of Gaza’s urban infrastructure has produced an estimated 4 million tons of debris, more than 20 times than that generated by all other military attacks on Gaza since 2008.
- This debris is heavily contaminated with asbestos, industrial and medical waste, heavy metals and human remains and is a major source of disease; the debris also contains huge amounts of unexploded military ordinance (estimated at 5%-10% of the total dropped on Gaza).
- 91 million tons of debris in industrial areas are contaminated with chemicals and other hazardous materials, with over a quarter of a million tonnes potentially containing heavy metals from destroyed photovoltaic cells.
It is estimated that safe disposal of the rubble would require over 700 hectares of landfill, a completely unviable option in Gaza’s densely populated and land-constrained context.
It is worth noting in this respect that under the Oslo II Accords, hazardous waste must be transferred to Israel, pending establishment of Palestinian disposal facilities. This mandate applies to the waste created by the Israeli attacks since October 2023 but this does not feature in the so-called Gaza peace plan.
Air Quality
- The destruction of energy infrastructure and the blockade has led to an exponential rise in the burning of wood, plastic, and other waste materials for cooking and heating, releasing high concentrations of particulate matter, dioxins, and other toxic compounds.
- Emissions from munition explosions and fires in bombed structures, including industrial facilities, have released significant quantities of toxic chemicals into the air, leading to measurable spikes in pollution, including sulphur dioxide and very high levels of smoke and dust.
- Deaths caused by acute respiratory infections have been rising rapidly throughout the conflict.
Water Quality
- The UN Environment Programme reported in June 2024 that “water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are almost entirely defunct“; the Palestinian Water Authority reported in March 2025 that over 85% of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure is inoperable.
- Gaza now primarily relies on groundwater sources, 97% of which is considered unsuitable for human use.
- This has created a major public health emergency, including the risk of a cholera epidemic and the emergence of cases of polio in children.
The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University analysed satellite data of damage to water facilities in Gaza and found that this damage did not follow a random pattern as it would if it was consistent with ‘collateral damage’ as consequence of a general bombing campaign. Rather, over time, bombing mapping reveals a pattern of damage that is tightly clustered around water facilities. This analysis estimated a < 1% likelihood of this cluster damage occurring by random chance. It therefore concluded that “Israeli military action has intentionally decimated civilian infrastructure in its attack on Gaza.”
Agriculture and Land Quality
Israeli military operations have used bulldozers to destroy Palestinian arable land for many years. Since 2014 this tactic has been complemented by the aerial spraying of herbicides, which have destroyed large areas of fertile farming land in Gaza, often without any warning. And, as Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University has testified, there is a much longer history of this.
During the current onslaught, this tactic has been systemised in new ways. The creation of a perimeter zone in Gaza, in which everything was destroyed, living or not, exemplifies this systematisation. As one report, based on the testimonies of Israeli soldiers reported:
“soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions. Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting…”
This is not only the logic at the perimeter – the same scorched earth orders have been generally applied across Gaza. By May 2025, the damage to crops in Gaza by bombing and military operations was assessed by the United Nations Environmental Programme as:
- 1 % of tree crops;
- 4 % of annual crops (including greenhouses);
- 1 % of shrubland; and
- 89 % of grass/fallow land
This is absolutely part of the deliberate starvation of Gaza that we heard in testimonies from Hani Almadhoun and Hilal Elver. And there will certainly be some permanent loss of fertile soil in Gaza, with irreversible ecological consequences.
In summary: the destruction of agriculture, water purification and energy infrastructure is central to the military goal: a sustained and systematic strategy to eradicate the capacity for Palestinian life in Gaza now, and severely limiting the capacity to survive at any point into the future.
The targeting of environmental infrastructure has been a particular feature of wars in the Middle East. There is a pattern that runs through Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza: that environmental infrastructure is to be particularly targeted as a mode of warfare. Crucially, as Shourideh Molavi has shown, this has unfolded in Gaza as a shift from targeting environmental structure in order to gain military advantage to targeting environmental structure as an end in itself.
At key moments in this war on Gaza, the main protagonists have themselves publicly declared their culpability in taking decisions that are calculated to attack the conditions of life of the entire population of those who remain in Gaza, making survival close to impossible.
They must be held accountable for the unimaginable hell they have brought to Gaza. We will never forget, and we can never stop fighting for accountability.