Gaza’s Environmental Meltdown
While the spreading Covid-19 pandemic commands the attention of the Gaza Strip’s beleaguered health system, a recent report, ‘It Takes Time to Unravel the Ecology of War in Gaza,’ and a new video, ‘Gaza Waiting for the Worst,’ indicate that the virus — however deadly — may not be the biggest long-term health threat facing Gaza’s residents.
Rather, on a day-to-day basis, children especially are being damaged for life by severe environmental factors that cannot begin to be dealt with until Israel’s 14-year-long siege is lifted.
The report, published in the September 14th issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health by a team of researchers from Gaza, Qatar, Finland and Italy, analyzes the impact on infants, young children and their mothers of heavy metal contamination caused by Israeli military offensives in 2008–9, 2012 and 2014.
Making war on an ‘open air prison’
These offensives with advanced weaponry, much of it supplied by the US, have killed thousands of Gazans (more than 700 of them children) and wreaked massive destruction on homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, municipal buildings, the industrial area, agricultural lands, and the vital infrastructure for water, sewage and electricity.
Military strikes have repeatedly pummeled a territory greatly weakened by the blockade that Israel imposed in 2007, following a legislative election in January 2006 that Jimmy Carter monitored and called fair and transparent. But because Hamas won the largest number of legislative seats, Israel and the US refused to accept the results. The failure of a CIA-backed Fatah coup attempt in 2007 led to the take-over of the entire Gaza Strip by Hamas.
With that, Israel sealed Gaza off from the outside world and for many months permitted only 12 basic items to enter the Gaza Strip — and just enough of them to keep people alive. Electricity and fuel were severely rationed, and cement, soap, many medical supplies, potable water and raw materials were kept out all together as Israel made Gaza a laboratory for trying out its new weapons systems and finding the breaking point of human beings.
The siege has been in place ever since, with full US support, as our government not only keeps Israel supplied with weapons, but maintains a “no contact” rule with Hamas. And after each aggression, the Israeli-imposed closure remained in place, blocking the import of essential building materials into what has been called “the world’s largest open air prison,” and forcing people to live in the rubble of their homes.
Heavy metals in the soil and hair
“When we planned the work,” the researchers wrote, “we were unaware of the persistence to be found, at an almost unabated level, of metal war remnants in the environment of Gaza, of the extreme difficulties the country would have to face in order to remove the debris and of the length of time these would stay in open air, but also of the severe food and employment crisis that followed the attacks in 2014 and continues for years since” — consequences of Israel’s blockade.
As the researchers discovered, the Gaza Strip was littered with toxic war remnants of shelling, bombs and missiles that have contaminated the soil with a range of heavy metals. Some, like arsenic and cadmium, are carcinogenic; some, including lead, are harmful to the brain; and some, like mercury and uranium, harm the development the fetus.
Their study, conducted over an eight-year period (from 2011–2019), found a growth in birth defects, in preterm and severely underweight babies, and in the stunting of young children. Hair samples taken from mothers, infants and children showed contamination persisted for years.
Sewage lakes and a polluted sea
When you add to that the pollution of water, the untreated sewage lakes and general contamination of the environment depicted in the video ‘Gaza Waiting for the Worst,’ it’s hard to imagine the Gaza Strip becoming livable again.
Because the blockade prevents Gaza from having enough electricity or fuel to operate wastewater treatment plants, some 110,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage are dumped into the sea everyday, threatening public health and the sustainability of the marine ecosystem.
According to the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy, waterborne diseases account for more than a quarter of all illnesses in the Gaza Strip. And most crucially for the long-term picture, Gaza’s sole aquifer, into which contaminated seawater has intruded, is about to be irreversibly damaged.
The collective punishment imposed by Israel’s blockade with US backing is stunting children who make up half of Gaza’s population and imperiling the lives of all of its residents. We must demand that it be ended.
Nancy Murray
October 7, 2020
