August 20, 2025
Ecocide: The environmental and human toll of israel’s genocide on gaza
After two years of genocide, Gaza’s natural environment has suffered catastrophic damage in every way. The sheer quantity of environmental devastation caused directly by Israel’s bombing campaign is part of the human toll of this genocide. In addition to the brutal impact on Gaza’s fragile ecosystem, the catastrophe wreaked on Gaza’s air, water, and soil quality will cause life-altering health complications, chronic illness, and premature death in Palestinians for decades to come.
Between October 2023 and March 2024, the IOF destroyed 40% of all agricultural land in Gaza. Half of Gaza’s trees were killed. Israel’s ground invasion leveled 90% of green houses in Gaza’s north. Herbicides and poison from Israel’s bombs caused crop yields to drop abysmally, with the threat of toxic residue remaining for the few crops that could still be harvested. Military outposts, created by the IOF on Palestinian land with military vehicles, left large swathes of previously populated land uninhabitable, and the soil of remaining farmland barren and infertile.
Israel’s attack on Gaza’s natural environment is, first and foremost, an attack on food sovereignty. Israel has aimed to strip Palestinians in Gaza of any ability to grow and distribute food locally, without reliance on aid or imported goods from outside Gaza. The objective of this campaign was to make tilling the land, harvesting fruits and vegetables, and fishing in the sea difficult to impossible. With Palestinians in Gaza unable to displace imported food with their own domestic production, starvation became the result in March 2025, when Israel began enforcing a total siege on the Strip.
To engineer the starvation of 2 million Palestinians, Israel had to ensure that domestic agricultural production in Gaza would be unable to displace foreign aid assistance. To this end, Israel deliberately targeted agricultural land, greenhouses, and wastewater treatment facilities with outflow to the sea.
Israel has destroyed all 5 of Gaza’s wastewater facilities. The facilities’ destruction has helped create deplorable living conditions and the rapid spread of communicable diseases in the displacement tents, where the majority of Palestinians in Gaza now reside. The destruction of the wastewater facilities has also resulted in the unregulated flow of untreated sewage into the ocean, uprooting the delicate balance of the marine ecosystem in the waters off Gaza’s coast and decimating Gaza’s fishing industry.
The IOF has also deliberately started fires in areas where there is a known groundwater supply for Palestinians to access. The use of white phosphorus—banned under international law but used regularly by Israel against Palestinians and South Lebanese—has released toxic fumes that have caused uncontrollable fires, releasing phosphoric acid and causing nearly irreversible contamination to groundwater reservoirs.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has dropped an estimated 70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip, the equivalent of 6 Hiroshimas. These bombs have together generated over 42 million metric tons of debris, dropped continuously for 20 months over an area roughly twice the size of Manhattan. Contained within this 70,000 tons of debris are unexploded ordinances, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals which accumulate and settle in the throats and lungs of Palestinians in Gaza, predisposing them to chronic illness and early death.
We cannot know the true death toll of this genocide, in part because many of the deaths caused by the genocide will not occur until years after the bombs themselves have stopped falling. Part of the hidden toll of the genocide is the health complications, which can be inherited by the next generation.
In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, over 20 years have passed since the U.S. invaded. Still, 100% of residents were found to have lead in their bones, and 29% of residents were found to have detectable amounts of uranium in their bones, with an overall increase of 1700% in health anomalies among the population compared to pre-2004 levels.
Again and again, imperialism shows its true face as the planet’s most complicit polluter and destroyer of both the natural and human environment that makes life possible. There can be no climate justice without the dismantling of the imperialist system that seeks to uphold genocide-for-profit and enforce forever wars as official state policy.
The struggle for a livable planet is inextricable from the struggle against the world system of imperialism. The fate of each is bound up with the other. And each serves as a constant reminder that another world is possible, if we are willing to fight for it.