“After the dust finally settles and the sides have buried their dead, not only will the Palestinian and the Israeli people remain, but so will a wounded environment.”
So declared veteran Israeli environmentalists Galit Cohen and Alon Tal in their paper “A Sustainable Restoration Plan for Gaza” in the International Journal of Conflict Management.
The two-year war in the Gaza Strip, now in an uneasy ceasefire, has physically devastated the enclave. More than 60% of Gaza’s urban infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. The area is littered with 60 million tons of rubble, mixed in with corpses and unexploded bombs, which must be removed before any reconstruction begins. The cleanup and restoration process is expected to take years or even decades.
The war has also caused a catastrophic environmental impact, experts say. The environment, of course, knows no political boundaries. Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan comprise a single ecosystem, with the pollution of air and sea spilling over into Israel and neighboring regions.
<br>Ecological makeover
When it comes to the environmental degradation resulting from the war, no one can accurately predict what the scale of the destruction will mean for Gaza’s environment in the long term.
Currently in Gaza, essential needs such as water, sanitation, electricity, shelter quality, and waste management have deteriorated to levels that make daily survival fragile.
Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry has not even begun looking into what the scale of the destruction in Gaza means for the environment, nor has it been involved in any plans by the various non-government bodies.
Gaza’s environmental hazards didn’t start with the Israel-Hamas war. For many years, Gaza residents have had no sanitation infrastructure beyond basic cesspools and septic tanks. Months of intense urban fighting have devastated whatever existing infrastructure there was.
Even before the devastating war, some Israeli NGOs, together with Palestinian and Jordanian partners, were working together to address the environmental hazards in Gaza.
“Gaza has long been in need of a fundamental ecological makeover,” Tal, a professor of climate and health at Tel Aviv University, told The Jerusalem Report.
“Any environmental restoration strategy has to overcome decades of dereliction and provide Gaza’s beleaguered residents with a sustainable future. But if the Gazans go back to the same situation it was before, they’re being punished twice,” he said.
<br>Environmental challenges
The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies has been running programs for 30 years that address the region’s environmental challenges. Together with the Palestinian organization Damour for Community Development, the institute has focused on developing off-grid water supply systems (i.e., those not connected to national water carriers) for Gaza and the West Bank for sanitation, energy, desalination, and wastewater treatment.
Once the war started, it soon became clear that with tens of thousands of people’s homes destroyed, it was even more urgent to provide shelters, water, and sanitation.
Together, the Arava Institute and Damour established the Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza initiative with the aim of providing immediate aid and relief in the war-torn territory. Almost overnight, the partnership applied its rich environmental expertise to urgent humanitarian needs.
“In the past, we’d had a relationship with COGAT. They knew who we were, so we were able to start working pretty quickly in Gaza,” said Barak Talmor, the initiative’s project manager, referring to the Israeli military body that oversees civilian coordination with the Palestinian territories.
“We tried to bring in technologies to the [refugee] camps, like atmospheric water generators, solar panels, small desalination systems, but they were considered ‘dual use’ items [items Israel has determined may be used in combat by terrorists], so we could not bring them in,” he explained.
“We had to figure out some other way to supply conventional humanitarian aid projects and constantly be in touch with Damour to see what the Palestinian team needed and how we could supply it: water storage systems, tents, hygiene kits, toilets and showers in the camps, and really whatever else was needed,” Talmor said.
When the refugee camps they helped establish started to become overcrowded, Jumpstarting Hope built additional water stations and toilets. When another one million people were displaced at the end of last August, the organizations established more camps.
<br>Environmental peacebuilding
EcoPeace Middle East, the regional environmental peacebuilding organization, which has been involved in cross-border environmental projects for decades, also found itself focusing on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Established 31 years ago by Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists, it’s been active in water and sanitation management and renewable energy diplomacy in the region.
“There’s an urgent need for more electricity in Gaza. Otherwise, they are dependent on burning diesel oil through generators, which is very polluting and doesn’t meet the needs,” explained Gidon Bromberg, the organization’s co-founder.
“At the moment, with the heavy rainfall, they’re operating with diesel and pumping the sewage into the sea, the best that can be done during this crisis, but it’s also not a solution. As we know, the direction of sea currents means sewage flows northward, which, in the past, has shut down the Ashkelon desalination plant in Israel,” he added.
Immediately following the start of the war, EcoPeace used its contacts to help reverse the decision to close the three pipelines supplying water to Gaza from Israel. Once the water was restored, the organization continued to play a behind-the-scenes role in coordinating the repair of those pipelines. EcoPeace has also been helping restore Gaza’s emergency fleet of water tankers and sewage trucks, and working to connect electricity to more desalination plants.
“While we’re working to supply the immediate humanitarian needs, we’re also very much active in doing studies about what is needed for rebuilding and how to create an economic engine that will make sure the day after is economically stable,” Bromberg stressed. “This is not going to be a five-year recovery – it’s probably going to take decades.”
Alongside the crucial emergency interventions, non-governmental organizations continue to develop long-term and sustainable recovery solutions. A recent EcoPeace study, for example, concluded that a large-scale desalination facility in Gaza – producing water not only for the population of Gaza and the West Bank but also for export to Jordan – “is highly feasible.”
<br>Green shelters
Since it’s already clear that the refugee sites have effectively become long-term settlements, the Jumpstarting Hope initiative has designed a Green Shelter Model to upgrade the camps to make them safer, cleaner, healthier, more dignified, and more autonomous within the current reality.
They will provide integrated services: water, sanitation, energy, shelter, and additional services. Some of these green shelters have already been established.
As the Arava Institute points out in its “Shared Environments, Shared Future” report, the “interconnectedness demonstrates how there is truly no winning in war, and the damage inflicted demands a collective, regional approach to recovery that acknowledges our shared ecological fate.”
EcoPeace’s Bromberg added: “As is the case with the shared nature of our environment, our collective survival depends on it.”■