The toxic waste of the Gaza war has reached Israel

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and representatives of the Board of Peace agreed to set up a working group on sanitation and public health affecting both Israel and Gaza. Its membership and detailed operating structure are yet to be made public.

It appears it has finally dawned on the Israeli authorities that the consequences of the unrelenting ecocidal destruction of Gaza were eventually going to hit Israel. The toxic leftovers of war – untreated sewage and contaminated rubble – are now a problem for Israeli public health as well.

Gaza shares the Mediterranean, coastal ecosystems and coastal aquifers with Israel. The destruction of its electric power and sanitation infrastructure forces over 100,000 cubic metres of raw, untreated sewage into the Mediterranean Sea or on land every day. Because in this part of the Mediterranean currents move primarily from south to north, this waste is carried straight up the coast into Israeli waters.

The Ashkelon desalination plant in southern Israel has been forced to shut down multiple times due to high faecal bacteria contamination from Gaza’s wastewater. Raw sewage also triggers toxic algae blooms blocking and damaging desalination filtration systems, as well as creating dead zones where fishing would normally happen.

Wastewater toxins, heavy metals and pathogens are absorbed by local marine life. Because fish migrate across maritime boundaries, contaminated seafood poses a direct health hazard to Palestinian as well as Israeli consumers. Raw sewage carries the same pathogens afflicting Gaza into the shared marine environment. Its northward drift directly impacts Israeli coastal cities.

Although pathogens can persist and migrate under certain conditions, pathogen contaminated groundwater is unlikely to feed into Israeli municipal water supplies, but can still affect the shared aquifer and surrounding environment.

Salts and other chemical contaminants can travel much farther and are often a bigger long-term aquifer concern. They can contaminate a shared groundwater system and reduce the quality and usability of the aquifer over time for irrigation, agriculture and drinking.

Israel has recently also begun moving some of the estimated 60 million tonnes of rubble from Gaza into undisclosed locations inside Israel and the West Bank, potentially transferring the pollutants in that rubble directly to disposal or storage sites. In recent weeks, Euro-Med Monitor tracked some 100 Israeli trucks daily leaving the Gaza Strip with debris.