June 29, 2024

Ecocide is Genocide

Today, Israeli occupation forces razed over 500 acres of agricultural land northwest of Rafah to the ground. The acreage, which consisted largely of greenhouses that grow staple vegetables in the besieged Strip, was the last major food basket for Gaza to evade large-scale destruction by the Zionist army. In the same 24 hour period, a number of children were admitted to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza’s north, for food poisoning due to consumption of tree leaves that are inedible for humans.

During the nearly 9 months of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Palestinians in north Gaza have been forced to rely on nature for sustenance, boiling herbs and grass to make “soup” which contains almost no nutritional value, and with which many families broke fast during Ramadan earlier in the year. Now, with the Israeli occupation having decimated nearly all of Gaza’s agricultural land this growing season, Palestinians in all of Gaza are contending with how to survive the weeks and months ahead.

Ecocide is genocide: this much should be clear, both from Israel’s genocide on Gaza and from the extensive history of imperial powers making agricultural land a priority for destruction. The decimation and conversion of fertile land into unsuitability for farming and food is a precursor to mass death by famine, and was used by the US and its allies in Southeast Asia and in Latin America throughout the mid 20th century in an attempt to starve the majority of the population and thereby coerce them into abandoning anti-imperialist resistance forces in their lands.

The Palestinian people, in their steadfast refusal to abandon their resistance, are currently paying the steepest price on earth in the form of prolonged hunger, malnutrition, and starvation. In the names of all our Beloved people, living and Martyred, we continue the battle, from wherever we are: to lift the siege on Gaza and to continue to make Palestine unavoidable, from wherever we are, until Palestine is free.