The ecocide in Gaza: Turning a homeland into a death zone
Displaced Palestinians sit by tents across from a garbage dump in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, 22 July 2024
Dan Steinbock writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 27 November 2025:
The final step of the broadest possible genocide is ecocide, that is, the intentional destruction of the environment necessary for the support of human life.
Ecocide, in turn, is directly related to the decimation of the reproduction of culture that Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer of the Genocide Convention, associated with the concept of “cultural genocide.”
Gaza is a textbook case.
The Long Legal Effort to Suppress Ecocide
In The Obliteration Doctrine, I show in painful detail how Lemkin had to compromise this idea. While he got strong support from the countries of the Global South, the former colonial powers – led by the United States and the United Kingdom – undermined Lemkin’s quest. Consequently, the current Genocide Convention is just a mutilated torso of the original idea.
Ever since Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, accused the United States of ecocide at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, war has often been seen as the primary cause of ecocide, along with over-exploitation of natural resources and industrial disasters.
In environmental law, ecocide (from ancient Greek oikos ‘home’ and Latin caedere ‘to kill’) connotes the destruction of the environment by humans. It has often been associated with genocide. In effect, in the late 1990s ecocide in peacetime was to have been included in the Rome Statute. However, it was deleted due to objections by the United Kingdom, France, and the United States; that is, by the former colonial powers. Such censure would not have surprised Lemkin, who knew well that these powers did not want to pay for their crimes in the World Court. Nonetheless, as a result, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court makes no provision for the crime of ecocide in peacetime, only in wartime.
Just months before October 7, 2023, the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide defined it as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
The Decades-Long Ecocide in Gaza
Well before October 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip had progressively been isolated from the West Bank and the outside world, overall, while being subjected to repeated Israeli military incursions – over three decades, in parallel with the Madrid and Oslo peace talks.
In terms of environmental damage, deterioration had worsened since 2014, when the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israeli military close to the eastern border of Gaza had been coupled with the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides. These illicit practices not only destroyed entire swathes of formerly arable land along the border fence, but also crops and farmlands hundreds of meters deep into Palestinian territory, resulting in the loss of livelihoods for Gazan farmers.
From a historical view, such massive bombardment went back to the early days of the Cold War, when the United States dropped bombs on North Korean dams to flood crops and induce starvation among civilians. To compound the same effect, irrigation systems were attacked on the ground. The difference is that, in Gaza, the geographic scope of destruction was far narrower than in Korea, but the decimation was far more effective, intensive and lethal.