Israel is drowning the West Bank in hazardous waste. Palestinians are paying the price with their health
The site of an electronic waste dump in the West Bank
Aseel Mafarjeh reports in Mondoweiss on 8 July 2026:
Lina Farajallah follows the dumping trucks every morning from the window of her quaint home in Idhna, a Palestinian town in Hebron in the southern West Bank. They carry waste from Israel and the nearby Jewish settlements into her neighborhood and dump it a few hundred meters from where she lives with her daughter.
The cargo in these trucks is mostly electronic waste from industrial plants outside the occupied West Bank. It does not fall within the 70,000 tonnes of e-waste that Israel officially recycles every year, but forms part of an undisclosed volume of industrial, chemical, and electronic waste openly dumped in the Palestinian territories from Israeli industrial settlements such as Barkan, Geshuri, and Kiryat Arba.
The trucks then head back to where they came from, and, like clockwork, the “sorters” of Hebron – Palestinians who have made a living re-selling electronic waste – arrive, take what they want, and burn the rest to extract the precious metals for reuse or sale.
For years now, Farajallah has suspected that the worsening, breathless coughs of her daughter, Heba, 13, come from the smoke that blankets the town and seeps into every room she and her daughter sleep in. “At first I thought it was a passing cold, but I noticed the bouts arrived and intensified whenever the smoke returned and eased when the fire died down, or the wind changed direction,” she tells Mondoweiss.
Idhna has become a hub for dismantling discarded Israeli electronics, stripping out metals like copper to resell, and setting fire to whatever is left, often on open and farming land around the town.