Nature has its say in Gaza

For nearly three years, Palestinians in Gaza have been taught, brutally, that almost everything necessary for ordinary human life can be destroyed or turned into an instrument of war. A home can disappear, a neighbourhood can be flattened, a road made impassable, a hospital rendered dysfunctional, a field made unreachable and a human contact can be turned into spying . Water pipes, wells, sewage networks and treatment plants can all be damaged until the very infrastructure of everyday existence collapses.

Palestinians have been denied the simple possibility of an abode: four walls and a roof to protect a family from the scorching summer sun, the winter rain and the harsh winds of the Mediterranean.

The rhythms that constitute everyday life of cooking, washing, schooling, sleeping, planting, working, visiting relatives, have all been repeatedly interrupted or made impossible. The Zionists attacks targeted the infrastructure and the material possibility of inhabiting Gaza; to ethnically cleanse the place and expand their presence.

International institutions have failed 

The legal system has spoken repeatedly. Humanitarian organisations have issued appeals, doctors have documented disease and malnutrition, engineers have assessed destroyed infrastructure, satellite imagery has calculated devastated neighbourhoods and agricultural land, and diplomats have negotiated resolutions and ceasefires. Yet none of these apparatuses has succeeded in restoring ordinary life to Gaza or preventing the continued erosion of the territory’s habitability.

Humanitarian intervention itself has been painfully inadequate compared with the scale of destruction. Trucks arrive carrying food, water and sometimes goods almost painfully trivial beside the enormity of need; medical missions enter for limited periods; small groups of paramedics, doctors and aid workers struggle heroically against conditions that overwhelm their capacities. Their work is indispensable, but humanitarian relief has increasingly been asked to compensate for a political catastrophe that humanitarianism was never designed to resolve. Water infrastructure is destroyed, and humanitarian agencies are then expected to truck water. Houses are demolished, and agencies distribute tents; agriculture collapses, and food parcels arrive; sanitation disappears, and emergency hygiene kits are supplied.

Development or reconstruction are surely not operated in there. Humanitarianism consequently risks becoming an administrator of catastrophe: An international system that mobilises limited relief while remaining incapable of stopping the conditions producing the need for relief. The distinction between helping people survive destruction and preventing that destruction has rarely been clearer.

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Nature having a say

In the midst of this political, legal and humanitarian failure, one force has proved to be considerably more difficult to control: nature itself. The sea, wind, groundwater, sewage, algae, insects and rodents cannot be instructed where to stop. They do not recognise military boundaries, buffer zones, checkpoints or the political geography imposed upon Gaza.

In early September, five of Israel’s six desalination plants were reportedly disrupted after microscopic algae clogged seawater intake systems. Scientists have debated the precise origin and causes of the bloom, with some pointing towards environmental conditions originating farther south and others asking whether the enormous quantities of untreated sewage flowing from Gaza into the Mediterranean may have intensified it.

OCHA has reported that all six wastewater-treatment plants have been rendered non-operational and that around 70 per cent of sewage pumping stations were out of service, with enormous quantities of untreated wastewater entering the surrounding environment. The destruction of water and sewage infrastructure therefore produces consequences that cannot simply be enclosed behind the Gaza perimeter. Albeit the power machine, the ecological destruction does not remain obediently within the territory in which it was produced.

The news of these last few days was about the un-obedient rats and mice.

Israeli communities surrounding Gaza have recently reported an extraordinary proliferation of rodents, affecting homes, military positions and agricultural land. Israeli reporting has described severe agricultural damage, including losses approaching 70 per cent in some peanut fields affected by jirds and other rodents.

The irony here; Months earlier, humanitarian agencies had warned about widespread rodent and insect infestations inside Gaza’s displacement camps, where accumulated garbage, untreated sewage, overcrowding and destroyed sanitation systems had created conditions in which families reported rodents entering tents and biting children while they slept. The Palestinian suffering has apparently proved impossible to contain within Gaza. Nature has begun, in its own unsettling way, to expose the ethnic cleansing perpetuated by Zionist military powers against humans, infrastructure and nature.  

Destruction to dispossess

Destruction produces dependency. Destroy agricultural land and people become dependent upon imported food; destroy water infrastructure and they depend upon tankers and emergency desalination; destroy housing and families depend upon tents; destroy labour markets and local production and households become increasingly dependent upon humanitarian transfers. The destruction of autonomy is therefore also a political economy of dependency.

UNICEF reported in 2026 that the overwhelming majority of families in Gaza remained water insecure, with many unable to obtain even the minimum quantity required simply for drinking and preparing food. An essential element that concerns the most basic physiological requirement for staying alive.

Agriculture has suffered a comparable destruction. FAO and UNOSAT assessments have documented the devastation of Gaza’s cropland, with only a tiny proportion remaining simultaneously undamaged and accessible. An agricultural society has made to be crippled. 

People who once upon a lifetime were active farmers, workers, traders, have been slowly administratively transformed into recipients of aid.

The ecological systems refuse administrative naming. Water moves beneath borders, sewage enters seas, algae follow currents, rodents migrate across damaged landscapes and pollution travels through air and soil. An ecosystem spoke more justly and challenged divisions according to political status of people living within it.The Mediterranean, after all, recognises neither Gaza nor Israel. Aquifers do not recognise citizenship. Rats do not carry permits.

When law failed to stop the destruction, when diplomacy proved incapable of stopping it and when humanitarianism was reduced largely to managing its consequences, nature began to expose what political power tried to conceal. Gaza is not an isolated ecological island whose destruction can be contained behind fences and military zones. Nature has had a stronger say. And it appears to be having the final word of justice.

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