With EU complicity, Israeli Nitzanei Shalom industries are poisoning Palestinian farmland
Palestinian workers leaving the Nitzanei Shalom complex at the end of their shift. Tulkarm, West Bank
Filippo Taglieri and Alessandro Stefanelli report in The New Arab on 23 June 2026:
The Green European Journal, Irpi Media and Altraeconomia co-published a set of edited versions of this investigation.
Plastic sheets flap in the air, torn and battered, while weeds and fallow fields lie beneath the bare iron skeletons of the greenhouses. The mechanical hum of nearby factories marks time like a clock. Oday breaks apart a wooden crate, using the pieces to light a small fire and make tea. His mother, Mona, steps into a greenhouse where, months earlier, they had planted herbs to sell, but returns shortly after, disheartened – many of the plants have withered. They have only a few hours left before the soldiers return to patrol the separation wall.
After drinking the hot tea under the shelter of a tree, they move to another greenhouse to gather peppers. The harvest is meagre, barely filling a few plastic bags. Oday checks the time – almost ten o’clock – they need to leave soon to avoid being seen by Israeli soldiers. By 10:30am, mother and son set off along the road back. The young man carries the plastic bags of peppers, while the woman speaks on the phone with a neighbour waiting for them in a van hidden along a nearby side street. Their land, reduced to a third of its original size, is squeezed between the separation wall dividing Israeli territory from the occupied West Bank to the west, and an Israeli industrial complex to the east
The story of the Taneeb family did not begin there. It is part of a much longer struggle that dates back to the mid-1980s, when residents of the Irtah neighbourhood, south of the city of Tulkarm, in the northwest of the West Bank, first heard the name “Geshuri” – a factory planned just a few hundred metres from their homes. In the years that followed, Israeli companies specialising in waste recycling, plastics, cement, and chemical production were progressively relocated from Israel to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). What began as a single facility occupying a few dunums expanded steadily into a cluster of 13 agro-industrial factories, forming the Nitzanei Shalom (lit. “Buds of Peace”) industrial settlement.
A prominent entity within this industrial hub is Geshuri Industries, an agrochemical company that relocated to its current 20–30 dunam site in Area C in the mid-1980s, reportedly with the encouragement of the Israeli government.
Oday Taneeb, a Palestinian farmer, shows white industrial discharge flowing through his agricultural field, just beyond the perimeter wall of the chemical factories. The runoff seeps directly into the soil; the white colour is caused by industrial waste products, likely discharged directly from the factories into the surrounding farmland.
Tulkarem, West Bank, Palestine
The factory was originally located in Israel in an area identified as Tel Mond, where it was the subject of intense legal battles and community protests over environmental violations, as reported in a 1999 Knesset document. While the factory owners, Ben-Zion Geshuri and Brig. Gen. David Shamir, along with senior manager Dr Raanan Geshuri, contended that the move had been motivated by a need for space and security issues, critics like former Member of Knesset (MK) Issam Makhoul stated that legal actions had forced the factory to suspend its operations at the original site due to public health harm, hence the relocation to a zone where safety and environmental standards could be bypassed more easily.
Over the past year, The New Arab (TNA) has examined how the Nitzanei Shalom industrial zone operates within a framework marked by fragmented jurisdiction, military restrictions, and weak or non-enforced environmental regulation.
Access to the area is restricted due to its designation as a “prohibited military zone,” limiting both independent assessment of soil and groundwater contamination, and farmers’ ability to reach and work their land. Through satellite imagery, TNA was however able to show that these facilities lack water treatment infrastructure for industrial discharge, washing water, and rainwater runoff, resulting in alkaline wastewater and sludge being released into surrounding Palestinian farmland and greenhouses. Over time, planning records and satellite imagery indicate that the site has undergone a substantial expansion despite formal objections from residents and the Tulkarm municipality.