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/
