gaza

IN THE past two years, Israeli obliteration has turned Gaza into an uninhabitable death zone. What is less known, however, is that this is the effect of decades of deliberate ecocide – and of the West’s purposeful efforts to undermine both genocide and ecocide legislation.

Recently, UN reported that Israel’s military activities, restrictions, and atrocities have wiped out decades of development gains in the economy of the occupied Palestinian territory.

Unfortunately, the situation in Gaza is even worse. The final step of the genocide is ecocide; that is, the intentional destruction of the environment necessary for the support of human life.

Ecocide, in turn, is directly related to the decimation of the reproduction of culture that Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer of the Genocide Convention, associated with the concept of “cultural genocide.”

Gaza is a textbook case.

The long legal effort to suppress ecocide

In The Obliteration Doctrine, I show in painful detail how Lemkin had to compromise this idea. While he got strong support from the countries of the Global South, the former colonial powers, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, undermined Lemkin’s quest.

Ever since Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, accused the United States of ecocide at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, war has often seen as the primary cause of ecocide, along with over-exploitation of natural resources and industrial disasters.

In environmental law, ecocide (from ancient Greek oikos ‘home’ and Latin caedere ‘to kill’) connotes the destruction of the environment by humans. It has often been associated with genocide. In the late 1990s, ecocide in peacetime was to have been included in the Rome Statute. However, it was deleted due to objections by the United Kingdom, France, and the United States; that is, by the former colonial powers.

Such censure would not have surprised Lemkin, who knew well that these powers did not want to pay for their crimes in the world court. Nonetheless, as a result, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court makes no provision for the crime of ecocide in peacetime, only in wartime.

Just months before Oct. 7, 2023, the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide defined it as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

The decades-long ecocide in Gaza

Well before Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip had progressively been isolated from the West Bank and the outside world overall, while being subjected to repeated Israeli military incursions – over three decades, in parallel with the Madrid and Oslo peace talks.

In terms of environmental damage, deterioration had worsened since 2014, when the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israeli military close to the eastern border of Gaza had been coupled with the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides.

Furthermore, the destruction is central to the Obliteration Doctrine of the Israeli military, which was initiated in Lebanon in the late 2000s and perfected in Gaza in 2023-25.

Even on the eve of Oct. 7, World Bank analysts warned that in the West Bank and Gaza, drivers of fragility, development constraints, and vulnerability to climate change were closely interconnected.

As the net effect of the Gaza War, widespread damage to built-up areas from the use of explosive weapons has resulted in direct impacts on water services and in millions of tons of debris, toxic waste, and destroyed agricultural lands. This has led to the outbreak of communicable diseases from poor water, health, and sanitation conditions.

The death zone

Hence, the damage to water infrastructure and wide-scale urban destruction, in combination with a severely degraded healthcare system, all of which posed a long-lasting threat to both public health and livelihoods.

The future that awaited Palestinians at the end of the hostilities was a Gaza turned into an “uninhabitable death war zone.”

By late April 2024, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza had already created 37m tons of debris. That amounts to an average of 300kg of rubble per square meter of land in the Gaza Strip.

Worse, much of these piles and heaps of debris and wreckage were laced with unexploded bombs, which could take up to 15 years of extensive work to remove, assuming the availability of 100 trucks on a daily basis.

Taking into consideration the fact that, on average, about 10 percent of weapons failed to detonate when fired, huge demining teams would be warranted for years.

Effectively, rebuilding Gaza will result in a total annual emissions figure higher than that of over 130 countries.

More importantly, the actual carbon footprint could prove five to eight times higher when emissions from the entire war supply chain were included.

Spillovers of ecocide

The overall cost for rebuilding Gaza is estimated to be tens of billions of dollars over decades, with some projections reaching as high as $70 billion.

The obliteration has inflicted severe and potentially irreversible environmental damage, including widespread contamination of water, soil, and air with toxic substances, the collapse of critical infrastructure, and massive carbon emissions.

The effects of this environmental catastrophe will, in one form or another, likely be felt by Israeli citizens for years or decades to come. In the foreseeable future, these key impacts may include public health crises, water contamination, adverse agricultural and economic effects, rising contribution to climate change, and, not to mention, the security concerns due to the deliberate creation of an uninhabitable environment in Gaza.

As Israeli environmental groups warned already a decade ago, the untreated sewage from Gaza that has flowed into the Mediterranean Sea is a ticking time bomb. Following the obliteration of Gaza, the destruction of wastewater treatment facilities creates a significant risk of infectious diseases, even cholera, that could spread along the coast.

Additionally, the potential contamination of shared coastal aquifers with seawater, heavy metals, and chemicals poses a long-term threat to Israel’s freshwater supplies.

The inconvenient truth is that water contamination, like ecocide, knows no borders.

—————————————————————————————–The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, seehttps://www.differencegroup.net/

ACCEPTED finally by both Hamas and Israel, the ceasefire in Gaza is the effective outcome of the US administration’s maximum pressure on Hamas and its embrace of the positions of several Arab states, particularly Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey.

But the end of hostilities represents barely the first of the three phases presumably proceeding from ceasefire in Gaza to peace in the Middle East. The devil is in the details, and the hardest talks loom ahead.

Here’s why: the complicated, multi-phase plan is riddled with caveats because the old U.S. approach to the Middle East is crumbling.

America’s military hegemony

Since 1945, the U.S. hegemony in the Middle East has relied on oil buys, weapons sales, and regime change. In diplomacy, Washington has favored bilateral peace treaties between Israel and Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) and the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Authority (1993-95).

Since his first administration, President Trump has built on the Abraham Accords (2020-21), a series of bilateral agreements to normalize relations among Israel and several Arab states, led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. With massive oil buys from and arms sales to Riyadh, the U.S. goal is to have Saudi Arabia join the Accords.

But arms sales are the key to America’s hegemony. In the case of its allies, the U.S. provides 60 to 80 percent of their lethal imports (Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia). In the rest, it accounts for 50 to 60 percent of the total (UAE, Iraq, Qatar), followed by Egypt.

Additionally, American hegemony relies on aid dependency. Between 1946 and 2023, Washington provided a whopping $373 billion in foreign assistance to the Middle East. Before the Gaza catastrophe, the bulk of the aid was steered to just a few countries: Israel ($139 billion), Egypt ($83-B), Iraq ($70-B), and Jordan ($24-B).

Since the Middle East is the largest regional recipient of U.S. aid, the impact should be reflected in increasing security and rising per capita income. Yet, the net effect has been precisely the reverse, as evidenced by the region’s “forever conflicts” and periods of historical economic stagnation.

Extensive periods of stagnating living standards

Worse, the military symbiosis between the U.S. and Israel has triggered huge adverse spillovers to adjacent Arab states. These severe destabilizations have been accompanied by lost years, even decades, with no increase in per capita incomes in these states.

Egypt coped with such stagnation in 1965-75 and again in the early 2010s. Jordan lost a decade after the 1967 Six-Day War, during the first Palestinian uprising in the 1980s, and again in the early 2010s. Even Israel hasn’t been immune to stagnation periods, as evidenced by past economic crises, the highest income polarization among OECD countries, and the huge cost-of-living protests after the failure of the peace process.

In Iran and Iraq, adversities have escalated since their 1980-88 war, in which the U.S. supplied arms to both sides. In Iraq, where the U.S. had backed the 1963 coup, per capita income in 2010 was where it had first been in 1978, over three decades before. In Iran, which suffered the first U.S.-UK regime change in 1953, U.S. sanctions prevented gains in per capita income for a quarter of a century after the Islamic Revolution and again in the 2010s.

Following the 1949 U.S.-led regime change, Syria’s democratic path was undermined until 2025. As a result, Syrian per capita income before October 7, 2023, is where it was last in 1981; that is, 44 years ago. In Palestine, per capita income is now where it was in the early 1970s, half a century ago. And in Yemen, per capita income is where it was 55 years ago.

China-led development

In the past decade, China has emerged as a credible and peaceful intermediary in the Middle East. In addition to investing significantly in countries burdened by decades of U.S. interference and regime change, Beijing has achieved several diplomatic coups.

Major regional Arab states, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, build on the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Saudi Arabia has joined the BRICS alliance, remains one of China’s largest oil suppliers, and is selling oil in multiple currencies. For decades, U.S. administrations fostered divides between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yet, in March 2023, these two countries resumed relations after a China-brokered deal.

In July 2024, China played a vital role in fostering Palestinian national unity in the Beijing Declaration, signed by 14 different Palestinian factions.

In August 2024, Beijing established a Second Silk Road in the region. In July 2025, China and Egypt expanded their bilateral cooperation across various economic sectors.

For years, China has called for and worked for de-escalation, sustained peace, and development in the region.

Surely the Middle East is large enough for both great powers – as long as the presence of each is predicated on diplomacy and peacemaking rather than abject obliteration.

Catastrophic economic and human costs

Since 1945, Washington has relied on destabilization and regime change in the Middle East to maintain its hegemony in the region. The post-9/11 wars alone have cost over $8 trillion and the lives of more than 1 million people.

In the past, US military aid to Israel amounted to $3.8 billion per year; since October 7, 2023, it has soared to $22 billion. In Gaza and Yemen, it has made the US complicit in genocidal atrocities.

In 2023-25, a quarter of a million Palestinians — mainly women and children — have been killed or wounded in Gaza, while more than 5.3 million people in the region have been displaced in Israel’s post-October 7 atrocities.

These catastrophic performances can be compared and contrasted with Chinese initiatives focusing on de-escalation and stabilization, particularly on investment, development, and modernization, which are hugely attractive in the Middle East.

The region has lost decades in self-defeating wars that have benefited primarily global defense contractors in the West. The time for decisive economic development, led by China and the Global South, has arrived, also in the Middle East.

Obliteration wars are no solution to 21st-century challenges.

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The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, a strategist of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China, and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China), and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/

The ecocide of Gaza

Time for change in the Middle East