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Violence as a Colonial Ecology: On Environmental Warfare in Gaza

“The Nakba also has a lesser-known environmental dimension, the complete transformation of the environment, the weather, the soil, the loss of the indigenous climate, the vegetation, the skies. The Nakba is a process of colonial imposed climate change.” - Eyal Weizmann 


Lush green tree with oranges over destroyed landscape. Debris scattered, dark smoke in sky. Piece of fabric with red, white, and green visible.
Illustration by Sanigdhaya Mahajan

Palestine has been the political moment for the last two years. As we approach the second anniversary of the most recent iteration of warfare on Palestine (that’s 730 days of ceaseless colonial violence), some reflections seem appropriate. Shourideh C. Molavi’s Environmental Warfare in Gaza provides exactly these reflections although written almost entirely before 7 October 2023. 


Blending cartography, testimonies, satellite imagery, and archival research, Molavi exposes the occupation in Gaza for what it is: not only military warfare, but intentional, well planned out and executed ecological violence. 


Molavi’s work, when read in combination with literature by other authors such as Kyle Whyte, Walter Rodney, and Achille Mbembe, highlights Gaza as the site of a state project where colonialism, capitalism, and violence intersect. In this investigation of the apartheid regime, we see a picture of environmental warfare as a tool to control land, erase cultural memory, and manufacture economic dependency. A tool, not a side-effect.


Colonialism as Ecological Violence


Eyal Weizmann, professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founder of Forensic Architecture, refers to the Nakba as “a process of colonial imposed climate change” in the book’s foreword. In doing so, he emphasises something that only recently came to light for me: the destruction of the natural and lived environment in Gaza is not a result of war; it is a strategy for genocide. 


Molavi notes the Nation Library of Israel’s description of the Gazan landscape: “The perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip is formed by a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a ‘buffer zone’, is established along Gaza’s ‘borders’, extending deep into Palestinian residential areas and farmlands.”


It’s not only the ever encroaching fences; Israel has made Gaza unliveable and unliveable conditions drive displacement. According to the UN, 96% of water from Gaza’s sole aquifer is unfit for consumption and all five wastewater treatment plants have been shut down. Further, Reuters reports that explosive devices have left more than 39 millions tons of debris on the streets of Gaza. Waste has been weaponised, too: a report by Al-Mezan shows that Israel regularly dumps untreated sewage and industrial waste into Gazan waters.


An understanding of the ecocide in Gaza as colonial requires an understanding of the Israeli government’s tactics as hallmarks of colonialism: extraction and resource capture, destruction and depopulation of land, waste and contamination, and manufactured cultural and economic dependency are all pillars of colonial violence.


The landscape in Gaza is flattened. This flattening has been accomplished through a series of attacks on both the natural and the built environment. Using herbicide sprayings to systematically kill plants, bulldozers to widen buffer zones, bombs to destroy buildings, and sometimes outright setting fire to trees, the occupation has successfully created a level plain, fit for the monitoring and surveillance of Palestinian people. 


Buffer Zones and Legibility


Surveillance is important to a military state and landscapes with high legibility (i.e. flatlands) make that surveillance easier. Surveillable landscapes are governable and the Israeli apartheid regime has successfully remapped Gaza using its ecology for that purpose.


According to the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, by 2018, no plants in Gaza were allowed to be over 40cm tall. So what of the orange and olive trees indigenous to Palestine? What of all the other flora that are over 40cm tall and the fauna that depend on it for survival? While much focused is placed on olive and orange because of their iconography and particular economic significance, Palestine is rich in flora affected by height restrictions: its national flower, the Iris (Iris haynei), oak, mulberry, apricot, and walnut trees all form the fabric of Palestinian landscape and nutrition. These plants are not just necessary for humans but they also serve as homes and food for countless species of animals.


The cultural, economic, and nutritional significance these plants and animals have to Gazans signify how the genocide is evidently a conservation catastrophe. Here, the systemic remapping is made clear as day: the occupation uses the vegetation to legislate ecocide and turn Gaza into its own petri dish so that “the Strip itself becomes an enclosure, a living laboratory of containment.”


This tactic is not unique to Israel. The architecture of the buffer zones is reminiscent of that of concentration camps. Prison camps like Svornost in Jáchymov, former Czechoslovakia had double fencing as a standard feature. A declassified CIA report released in 2013 and titled only “Information Report”, details this architecture: at Svornost, the space between this fencing is thought to be approximately 2 meters long. It was also cleared of vegetation and strewn with light sand or stones, so that any disturbance — any footprints, digging, or anyone running across — would be noticed.


Legibility is control and lands made legible are easy to destroy; which is the ultimate objective.


Chemical Warfare


According to Molavi, the occupation has also opted for short-notice aerial herbicide fumigation and razing. “Since 2014, the settler-colonial modification of Gaza’s environment through the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential land along its eastern perimeter has been complemented by the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides.”


The Israeli army has confirmed that they use three herbicides during the spraying: glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, and diuron. Glyphosate is the world’s most popular herbicide. According to the World Health Organisation’s Cancer Research Agency, the iteration of it used by the army — Roundup — is “probably carcinogenic” too. All in all, these herbicides persist in air, water, soil, and even food for up to over a month after being sprayed. Given that these are sprayed consistently and not once off, they not only persist, but build up. They increase in concentration in soil, water, and air, and therefore the plants, animals, and people that consume them — quite literally changing the chemical composition of Gaza.


In spraying toxic chemicals into the air above Gaza on whatever days, at whatever times, at whatever intervals they please, the Israeli government decides when and how to expose the Palestinian people to death. According to Mbembe, herein lies the ultimate expression of sovereignty: “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.” 


Bodies as Borders


“In Gaza, the population is the border. The human body, its density, its movement, its survival, becomes the very site where sovereignty is articulated and maintained.” - Shourideh C. Molavi


It is not only the land that finds itself under stringent controls, but the body, too. Much like how wildlife at nature reserves is tagged and observed for the purpose of understanding its behaviour and movement as a group, Palestinian people are surveilled, given permits, put through blockades and health evacuations, for the purpose of shifting the border. 


Since the Palestinian medical system is severely under-resourced (by design), patients usually have to travel outside the country to receive medical assistance, especially for chronic and terminal illnesses. Permit laws mean that these patients must apply to leave the country. According to WHO, 33% of patients were denied permits in 2022 (47% for women) and 62% of applications for companion visas were denied. 


Additionally, because of the limited crops Palestinian people are allowed to grow due to height restrictions, Palestine relies heavily on imported goods, which are also subject to permit regulations. These are border-making activities.


The Israeli military’s authority over who and what gets to enter and exit Palestine does two things: it regulates the population size and turns people into borders. The truth is that the strict border control in Gaza has very little to do with the borders and very much to do with the people. Not allowed inside and certainly not allowed outside, their bodies become the site of contention — the border that needs constant monitoring, the moving target.


Cultural Memory and Iconography


Gaza sits on the Eastern Mediterranean coast and displays mild-winter/hot-dry summer patterns. Annual rainfall ranges between 200mm in the south and 400mm in the north and average annual temperatures are warm according to the Red Cross Climate Center. 


Olive trees (Olea europaea) are well adapted to this climate because they’re relatively drought-tolerant. Orange trees, on the other hand, require much more water (in the ranges of 900mm to 1,200mm) than the annual rainfall can provide and have been successful in Gaza’s climate because of extensive groundwater irrigation systems.


Olive and orange exports were a large part of Gaza’s economy, but the previously discussed bulldozing and razing operations, aerial herbicide sprayings, buffer zones, crop-height restrictions, and military export controls all culminated to curate the disappearance of these trees. 


Molavi cites Mustafa Kabha and Nahum Karlinsky: by 1978, two thirds of Gaza’s exports went to Israel. She also notes that Palestinian farmers were “barred from producing items that would compete with Israeli goods”, creating an economic dependence on Israel. Journalist, historian, and filmmaker, Joan Mandell reports that this drastically reduced incentive to maintain irrigation infrastructure.


The trees that once shaped Palestinian identity, culture, and economy were gone and Gaza effectively lost the capacity to feed itself. Here, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics rears its head again and the settler-colonial state gets to decide who may live and who is to die.


In the wake of the oppressive apartheid regime’s stalking and controlling of Palestinian people and their movements and the war on trees, the Jaffa orange rose as a symbol of Palestinian resilience and countered the colonial eco-imaginary of Palestine as a desert-scape and unsalvageable destroyed place. It could be seen throughout the streets in Gazan art as a symbol of hope and power.


Indigenous philosopher and environmental justice scholar Kyle Whyte says “settler colonialism can be interpreted as a form of environmental injustice that wrongfully interferes with and erases the social-ecological contexts required for Indigenous populations to experience the world as a place infused with responsibilities to humans, nonhumans and ecosystems.” The emergence of orange iconography in Gazan art is a resistance against this violence.


Refusal and Regrowth


Palestinian people still plant, rebuild, and resist — refusing to succumb to the death that the occupation subjects them to. 


Molavi details the Great March of Return and the Breaking of the Siege: in 2018, Palestinians of all ages, religious convictions, and genders marched along the border perimeter in the East of Gaza to “commemorate 70 years of Nakba”. The protests were accompanied by incendiary devices flown on kites at night designed to mobilise the wind to set fire to Israeli controlled farmlands along the border.


“Cultural and recreational activities such as folk dancing, collective reading, children’s entertainment and games, arts and sports activities, mass prayers, and cooking of traditional food were conducted along the perimeter as an act of defiance, return, reclamation, and steadfastness.”


Palestinians continue to plant trees even though they know these will be bulldozed, razed, sprayed or simply cut down too — using cultivation as a way to refuse to die.


Future-Making: After the Warfare


As I write this, Brazilian activist and Steering Committee member of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Thiago Ávila, has announced that the Flotilla has just passed its “last safe port”. The Flotilla is the third humanitarian mission to attempt to bring aid to Gaza by sea and break the siege. The two previous Flotilla, the Madleen and the Handala, were attacked by Israeli drones and the activists on board were apprehended and detained when the missions got critically close to the beaches of Gaza.


This time, taz reports that Spain and Italy have sent navy ships to back the movement. The mission comprises 50 humanitarian boats and two navy ships so far. This is our political moment. It is critical.


As we watch on, many of us may feel helpless and powerless. When you’re done donating to the crowd funders for people living in Gaza, remember the Palestine I’ve described to you. Alyan reminds us, after all, that “bearing witness is an honor. We witness so that we may tell the truth.”


When you start to feel like there is nothing you could possibly give Palestine, give it your memory: remember the Palestine of olives, Jaffa oranges, and fertile ground, not the desert-scape manufactured by the occupation and peddled by the media. If you don’t have money, give it your eyes: watch the Flotillas, watch the reels, watch the news. If you have already done this, lend it your voice: the ones in Gaza are barely audible over the bombs. 


And it’s normal to lack words. What could you possibly conjure up that would make things better? When you start to choke while you figure out what to shout across the sea to Palestine, Gumbs’ words may be helpful: 


“I love you. And even on your sickest, saddest day you deserve an ocean as blue as your name. You deserve a safety as deep as your need. You deserve food, community, school, and home. And you were not wrong to associate with your kindred. And you were not wrong to breathe loud about what you believed. And the dizziness you feel is justified. We are living in a world off course. And the pressure in your lungs is urgency. We have to learn the language of this air. We are sick of these tired cycles of economic vulnerability, resource grabs, and waste and harm spiraling down. We are ready to breathe differently.”


Should you finish that, lend Palestine your breath: devote yourself to tearing down the systems that make violence on so many scales possible and learn how to breathe differently.




Edited by Thenthamizh SS


Tatenda Dlali (she/her) is a student of Environmental Science and Associate Editor (Climate) at Political Pandora, where she leads the Climate Department. Her research focuses on conservation ecology, the intersections of gender, migration, and climate change, and decolonizing the climate justice movement.



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References: 






  • Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned : Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Ak Press, 2020.





  • MOLAVI, SHOURIDEH C. ENVIRONMENTAL WARFARE in GAZA. Pluto Press, 2023.



  • “Quentin Quarantino on Instagram: ‘This Morning off the Coast of Crete, with Israel Escalating Threats of Violence to Us after Recent Drone Strikes, Those of Us on the Familia Boat Gathered on Deck. Steering Committee Member Thiago Ávila Told the 28 of Us Aboard That If Anyone Felt Too Afraid to Continue, This Was the Final Chance to Step off - and That No One Would Be Judged. Not a Single Person Moved. Every One of Us Is Staying Aboard. We’re Going to Gaza to Break the Siege. This Mission Is Bigger than Us. 🇵🇸.’” Instagram, 2022, www.instagram.com/reel/DPB5uY6DJYD/?igsh=ZDFteW5samcyNDl6. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.






Keywords: Gaza Ecocide, Nakba Palestine, Colonial Violence, Olive Trees, Orange Trees, Buffer Zones, Water Crisis, Gaza Blockade, Land Theft, Toxic Chemicals, Human Rights, Border Control, Settler State, Ecological War, Cultural Memory, Economic Dependency, Palestinian Resistance, Herbicide Use, Global Solidarity, Surveillance State

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