Does damage to the environment incurred in the course of
fighting a defensive war constitute a war crime? Of course not, but that hasn’t
stopped those who hate Israel from accusing the Jewish State of committing
“ecocide.” That’s right: they’ve coined a cute word for it that combines
“ecology” with genocide. It’s a myth, but who cares? If you can bash Israel for
public consumption, it’s fine.
The Guardian
accused Israel of ecocide a year ago, using almost 1800 words to make the
point. One of the three authors of this screed is Aseel Mousa, a “freelance
journalist based in Gaza.” (What? You were expecting the Guardian to keep its
content bias-free—this was anything but that.):
‘Ecocide in Gaza’: does scale of environmental destruction
amount to a war crime?
In a dilapidated warehouse in Rafah, Soha Abu Diab is living
with her three young daughters and more than 20 other family members. They have
no running water, no fuel and are surrounded by running sewage and waste piling
up.
Like the rest of Gaza’s residents, they fear the air they
breathe is heavy with pollutants and that the water carries disease. Beyond the
city streets lie razed orchards and olive groves, and farmland destroyed by
bombs and bulldozers.
“This life is not life,” says Abu Diab, who was displaced
from Gaza City. “There is pollution everywhere – in the air, in the water we
bathe in, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the area around us.”
For her family and thousands of others, the human cost of
Israel’s invasion of Gaza, launched after the Hamas attack on 7 October, is
being compounded by an environmental crisis.
The full extent of the damage in Gaza has not yet been
documented, but analysis of satellite imagery provided to the Guardian shows
the destruction of about 38-48% of tree cover and farmland.
Olive groves and farms have been reduced to packed earth;
soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is
choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.
Researchers and environmental organisations say the
destruction will have enormous effects on Gaza’s ecosystems and biodiversity.
The scale and potential long-term impact of the damage have led to calls for it
to be regarded as “ecocide” and investigated as a possible war crime.
Yup. That’s what happens when you gang-rape Israelis, murder families, and take
hostages to Gaza where you torture and starve them and keep them underground
for over 500 days. But wait, there’s more. The authors tell us that IDF “says”
it follows international law, which is supposed to make this a balanced
piece—except for the impression the reader receives, which is that Israel is
being less than forthright:
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it follows
international law and attempts to limit damage to agricultural areas and the
environment.
“The IDF does not intentionally harm agricultural land and
seeks to prevent environmental impact absent operational necessity,” it told
the Guardian.
Satellite imagery, photos and video footage from the ground
show how Gaza’s farmland, orchards and olive groves have been destroyed by the
war.
Perhaps the authors regretted giving Israel even that much
credit, because a few paragraphs later, they inform the reader that actually, Israel
is destroying Gaza’s environment on purpose. It’s “systematic,” they say,
pointing to repeated aerial bombardments in specific locations vulnerable to
ecological damage.
Samaneh Moafi, FA’s assistant
director of research, describes the destruction as systematic.
Researchers used satellite imagery to document a
repeated process in multiple locations, she says: after initial damage from
aerial bombardment, ground troops arrived and dismantled greenhouses
completely, while tractors, tanks and vehicles uprooted orchards and fields of
crops.
“What’s left is devastation,” says Moafi. “An area that is
no longer livable.”
The thrust of the Guardian piece is that the ecological
fallout from the war Gaza started is not simply war-induced ecological damage,
but a purposeful attempt to destroy Gazan wildlife, pollute the air that Gazans
breathe and the water they drink, and make it impossible for Gazan farmers to
grow food.
Abeer al-Butmeh, the coordinator of the Palestinian
Environmental NGOs Network, says: “The Israeli occupation has completely
damaged all elements of life and all environmental elements in Gaza – they
completely destroyed the agriculture and wildlife.
“What is happening is, for sure, ecocide,” she says. “[It]
is completely damaging the environment in Gaza for the long term, not only for
the short term.
“Palestinian people have a strong relationship with the land
– they are very connected to their land and also to the sea,” she says. “People
in Gaza cannot live without fishing, without farming.
FA says: “The destruction of agricultural land and
infrastructure in Gaza is a deliberate act of ecocide.
“The targeted farms and greenhouses are fundamental to local
food production for a population already under a decades-long siege. The
effects of this systematic agricultural destruction are exacerbated by other
deliberate acts of deprivation of critical resources for Palestinian survival
in Gaza.”
Well, maybe they should have thought of that before they murdered
more than 1,200 people with unprecedented cruelty, and took 251 people hostage.
Not to be outdone by the Guardian, Reuters
also weighed in on the ecological damage that those mean Israelis did to the
“innocent” people of Gaza. But that’s okay. They’re just repeating what the UN
told them—and we all know how the UN lavishes untold amounts of love for Israel:
Gaza conflict has caused major environmental damage, UN says
The conflict in Gaza has created unprecedented soil, water
and air pollution in the region, destroying sanitation systems and leaving tons
of debris from explosive devices, a United Nations report on the environmental
impact of the war said on Tuesday.
The war between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist movement
that controls the Gaza Strip, has swiftly reversed limited progress in
improving the region's water desalination and wastewater treatment facilities,
restoring the Wadi Gaza coastal wetland, and investments in solar power
installations, according to a preliminary assessment, opens new tab from
the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).
Explosive weapons have generated some 39 million tons of
debris, the report said. Each square metre of the Gaza Strip is now littered
with more than 107 kilograms (236 lbs) of debris. That is more than five times
the debris generated during the battle for Mosul, Iraq, in 2017, the report
said.
"All of this is deeply harming people's health, food
security and Gaza's resilience," said UNEP Executive Director Inger
Andersen.
Gaza's environment was already suffering from recurring
conflicts, rapid urban growth, and high population density, before the most
recent conflict began on Oct. 7.
Interesting how the conflict simply “began” on October 7, as
opposed to Israel responding to an attack of unprecedented cruelty by Gaza.
Even now, they torture our captives. President Trump remarked on the fact that
not a single Gazan person has been kind to hostages or given them a bit of
hope:
“I said, ‘Did you see anybody in there [who] was kind out of the hundreds of
people that you were seeing [from] Hamas? Did some of them wink at you and say,
‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be okay, or give you a piece of bread?’ ‘No.’
“I said, ‘Were there any people that were like kind? I was
shocked. The answer was nobody. There was nobody. Just the opposite. They’d be
slapped and punched. One man broke his ribs. He couldn’t breathe for a month.
It was brutal."
But none of the people with their accusations of ecocide
care about kindness to hostages. They are also not kind. In fact, you will not
find a single mention of the captives in any of their long-winded allegations
of a supposedly deliberate Israeli campaign to destroy the environment of Gaza.
They don’t want you to know what Gaza did and is still doing to Israel. They don’t
want you to know what Hamas did to the Bibas babies and their mother.
No. They don’t want you to know any of that. Instead, they
tell you that Israel just went into Gaza and destroyed all the trees, air,
land, and water for no reason (those horrible Jews). Take the University
of California Global Health Institute (UCGHI). In its report on the so-called
“ecocide” in Gaza, there is not a single mention of the captives. It’s all
about the nasty, nasty Jews:
Ecocide in Gaza: Israel's genocide in Gaza will create an unprecedented
environmental health crisis
As Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, thousands of
Palestinians continue to drown in death and disease. The environmental
devastation in Gaza, however, is an often overlooked but critical aspect of the
ongoing genocide by Israel on Palestine. The relentless assaults on Gaza have
not only caused immense human suffering but have also inflicted severe and
lasting damage on the environment, transforming the region into a toxic
wasteland. This environmental demolition, referred to as "ecocide,"
is a deliberate strategy that compounds the humanitarian crisis and poses a
long-term threat to the region's sustainability and the health of its
inhabitants.
One might have guessed that Greenpeace
would jump on the blame Israel ecocide libel. They really, really hate Israel.
It’s to be expected. Tree huggers tend not to like Jews. Or shall we say they’d
rather hug a tree than a Jew. Greenpeace Legal Researcher Farah Al Hattab has
no problem calling the environmental damage to Gaza, “deliberate.” The words
“captives” and “hostages” do not once appear in her “ecocide” report:
Scorched-earth: making Gaza uninhabitable for
generations to come
Concepts such as “ecocide” have been used by experts and NGOs to describe the ongoing deliberate destruction of Gaza’s environment. A recent satellite analysis reveals that “the scale and long-term impact of the destruction have led to calls for it to be investigated as a potential war crime, and to be classed as ecocide, which covers damage done to the environment by deliberate or negligent actions.”
International law requires Israel to bear the cost of rebuilding Gaza, given its recognised responsibility as an occupying power.
Al Hattab concludes her rant with a poignant reference to seeing genocide with her “own eyes,” by which she means she’s seeing it on her phone:
From July:
AND THEN there are the multiple brush and forest fires
persistently being lit every day in Judea and Samaria by Palestinian terrorists
in an attempt to literally smoke Israeli farmers, ranchers, and settlers out of
the area.
Over the past months, firefighters have battled well over 1,000
fires in Judea and Samaria, many of them adjacent to Jewish towns and Israeli
army bases, almost all of them certainly caused by arson.
This included difficult-to-control fires around the
community of Peduel, on the western ridge of Samaria, and adjacent to Elon
Moreh, an Israeli town of 2,000 people in the Samarian highlands; fires near
Revava, Shavei Shomron, Karnei Shomron, Salit, Nahal Shiloh, Yitzhar, Givat
Itamar, Tzur Harel, Oz Zion, and Kochav Hashachar; in Gush Etzion and the
Jordan Valley; near the important IDF base on Mount Hazor near Ofra, near the
Mount Kabir base above Nablus, and adjacent to the “Ofrit” base on Mount Scopus
on the eastern ridges of Jerusalem.
And every single day, Palestinians and their extreme
left-wing Israeli anarchist allies torch the grazing grounds of cattle in the
central Binyamin and Samaria highlands where pioneering Israelis have
established a string of some 100 ranches (in Hebrew: havot) – or as Western
media and hostile NGOs call them, “wildcat settler outposts.”
The grass and brush that grows in the vast and mostly
unsettled parts of Binyamin and Samaria are “natural gold” for feeding these
herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.
Burning the pastures is outright warfare, designed to
firebomb Jewish “settler sheep” off the land and drive settlers from the area.
This is not too different from the devastation caused by
thousands of incendiary balloons and kites sent over the Gaza border by Hamas
since 2018, firebombs that destroyed tens of thousands of acres of nature
reserves and farmland in southern Israel. (Experts say it will take years to
rehabilitate the burned farm fields in southern Israel.)
Arab arson has been a serious problem in Israel for a very long time, causing
damage to forests, farms, and wildlife, and polluting Israel’s air and water.
Beginning in 2016, Arabs setting fires became a regular feature, especially in
summer. But it wasn’t like it was a new tactic. The
LA
Times reported on the damage from Arab arson already way back in 1988:
Fires Destroy 60 Acres of Israel Forests: Arab Arson Blamed; Shamir Sees Threat
to National Survival
JERUSALEM — Fires attributed to Arab arsonists destroyed
more than 60 acres of treasured forest in northern Israel today, and a rash of
stone throwing signaled new momentum in the 6 1/2-month-old Palestinian
uprising.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called the new wave of
violence an attempt to destroy the Jewish state.
“There is a wave of aggression, whether arson or murder,
against the Jewish presence everywhere in the land of Israel,” Shamir told
Israel army radio. “The problem is one of survival.”
Police, firefighters and volunteers, backed by army
helicopters and planes, were on alert for arson. The uprising’s leaders had
ordered Palestinians to set fire today to Israel’s farms, forests and
factories.
Eight fires erupted, and all but one of those were of
suspicious origins, police said. David Angel, spokesman for the Jewish National
Fund, said that was less than the 18 average daily fires last week.
“It’s because we had so many people out looking,” he said.
The largest fire scorched 50 acres of woodlands in Mt.
Gilboa, 70 miles north of Jerusalem, some of it part of a reforestation program.
The blaze began overnight.
“You see years of work go up in smoke in a few minutes,”
Avraham Yariv, head of the Gilboa Regional Council, told Israel radio. “You
stand helpless before this terrible sight.”
Yariv said the fire was obviously arson because it started
in four places.
Angel said another blaze destroyed 10 acres of woodlands
near Kfar Qassem, north of Tel Aviv. “This was a young forest first planted a
couple of years ago,” he said.
Loss of Trees Painful
The destruction of trees is especially painful to Israelis,
who take pride in having made the desert bloom. Many of the trees were bought
by American Jews in memory of relatives.
Police Commissioner David Krauss said the fires were set by
Palestinians, some of them as young as 8 or 9.
In the last two months, fires have destroyed 35,000 acres in
Israel, much of it cherished farmland and forest, about 10 times last year’s
total.
Arab arson is a common occurrence in Israel, especially in
summer. The devastation almost defies description. From Aug. 10 2012:
A wave of fires has hit Israeli in recent weeks. Police believe most of the
fires were started by Arab arsonists as a form of terrorist attack.
Nature and Parks Authority head Shaul Goldstein told Arutz Sheva that the
damage done by the fires is even greater than some realize. “These fires –
beyond destroying the plant life, they completely destroy the animal life, from
small animals to large animals,” he said.
“Our job is to rehabilitate the area after the fire,” he continued. He called
on the public to help by reporting any fire, no matter how small. “A small fire
can be put out with a cup of water, but a large fire cannot be put out by
even 10 firefighting planes.”
A
June 2019 story
offers a bit of a timeline of Arab arson in Israel from 2016 and onward:
Israel has been facing weeks of ongoing fires in recent weeks. Fifty families
have been left homeless, countless animals have died, and thousands of acres of
land have been destroyed, including pristine forests in central Israel.
The media framed the fires as the result of the high heat
temperature - until the investigations began.
"Hundreds of the fires in the last weeks in Jerusalem
and Beit Shemesh area were a result of arson," Kan
News reported.
Here are the facts from the wave of fires that began in Israel on November
2016:
Firefighters have fought 1,773 fires.
In Haifa for example, 527 apartments were destroyed leaving
1,600 people homeless. 75,000 residents were evacuated and more than 20,000
dunams of forests burnt.
After a thorough investigation, it was determined that out
of 80 fires that were checked, 71 were the result of arson.
Firefighter Ran Shlaf, considered the premier authority in
fire investigations in the country said: “Yes. We've faced arson terror. There
is no dilemma or doubt about it. All the villages that were burned were Jewish,
and all those arrested or prosecuted were Arabs. And from a thorough
investigation we conducted, no one else in the Middle East - including the
Palestinians - experienced such an extreme wave of fires like we
experienced".
A year earlier, in June 2018, Israel National News damage
the damage from incendiary balloons and kites—yes, kites, too. Nothing like a
kite or a balloon to catch the eye of a Jewish child and make them want to pick
it up and play with it. Naturally these Arab arsonists love the thought of
blowing up Jewish children:
Firefighters on Saturday worked to extinguish 24 fires which
broke out in Gaza border towns due to incendiary kites and balloons sent into
Israeli territory by Gazan arson terrorists.
All of the fires are now under control.
The kites and balloons sent into Israel are armed with
firebombs and other explosives. Some of them have landed in private homes and
near kindergartens and playgrounds, and others have sparked fires in
populated areas. Most of the incendiary kites and balloons have caused
agricultural damage, scorching fields of wheat and produce.
As of the beginning of June, the arson terror had caused 5
million NIS ($1.4 million) in damage, and scorched over 5,000 dunam (1,235
acres) of land.
In September of 2024, the JNS reported that Arabs burned down homes in Halamish and caused extensive damage to a nearby forest:
Palestinian rioters targeted Neve Tzuf (also known as Halamish)
in the Binyamin region of Samaria on Thursday, throwing Molotov cocktails at
the village.
The attack resulted in a rapidly spreading fire, forcing the
evacuation of residents in the first few houses near the edge of the community.
It took two firefighting planes and several firefighting
teams to bring the blaze under control. The terrorists responsible for the
attack fled towards the nearby village of Deir Nidham.
Deputy Commander Ido Peretz of the Binyamin Regional Fire
Station detailed the response: “Due to our knowledge of the area and
understanding of the threats, numerous teams were dispatched from the Binyamin
Regional Fire Station, as well as assistance from neighboring stations in the
Judea and Samaria district and inter-district support.”
He added, “This is a forest located within the town, and at
this time, the fire is moving with the help of the winds. A pair of
firefighting planes from the Elad squadron are on their way to the location to
assist in extinguishing the fire.”
By Thursday afternoon, there was no longer any danger to residents, but the
nearby forest was badly damaged and there was tremendous damage to ecological
systems and wildlife . . .
. . . This is not the
first time that Neve Tzuf has been targeted. In 2016, another Palestinian arson
attack struck the town, destroying 23 homes and causing severe damage to
several others.
A statement from Neve Tzuf administration back then
highlighted the ongoing threat: “The light punishment given to the terrorists
who carried out the attack serves as inspiration for every copycat terrorist.
With the simple means of a Molotov cocktail, they cause immense damage that
takes many years to repair, if it can be repaired at all.”
In December
of 2018, there was finally a winter lull from all the warm weather arson, a
lull long enough for the Israel Nature and Parks Authority to take stock:
The four-month arson terrorism campaign, part of the campaign of border
violence orchestrated by the Hamas terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip,
has resulted in appalling damage: Some 32,000 dunams (7,900 acres) of Israeli
fields, parks and other lands have been reduced to ash.
The report found that 12,086 dunams (2,987 acres) of
national parks and nature reserves, 9,873 dunams (2,440 acres) of JNF-owned
land, 4,237 dunams (1,047 acres) of agricultural fields and 6,085 dunams (1,504
acres) of open land have been burned. Since the arson terrorism began, 14% of
all nature reserves in the region bordering the Gaza Strip have been lost to
fire.
The worst-hit areas are the Be'eri Crater Nature Reserve,
78% of which has been burned, and the Kurkar Niram Nature Reserve, 77% of which
has been burned. Fifty percent of the Karmiya Nature Reserve, 30% of the Reches
Gvaram Reserve, 27% of Nahal Grar Park, and 21% of the Besor Nature Reserve
have also been lost to the fires.
The parks authority is concerned that invasive plant species
could replace local plants and cause more damage. Workers are taking care to
root out invasive species, and next spring, after the winter rains, the
authorities plan to inspect the damaged areas for any changes to the plant
life.
The fires have annihilated wildlife as well as flora. The
bee-eater birds indigenous to the Besor Reserve are gone, their nests having
been lost, and Be'eri's wild turtle population has suffered a critical blow.
As well as destroying animal habitats, Hamas also used
animals to set the fires, releasing hawks into Israel to which operatives had
attached burning fuses.
According to the INPA, the fires have caused some 15 million
shekels ($4 million) in damage to nature reserves alone and the amount of
territory lost will make it too difficult for the nature reserves to
rehabilitate themselves, requiring human intervention.
"We are now seeing the scope of the damage caused to
the nature reserves, and it's immense," said INPA Southern District
Director Gilad Gabbai. "Most of the Be'eri Reserve has been burned, and it
almost doesn't have the resources for renewal. It's a really tough blow. We
need to take more aggressive action that wasn't needed in the past. We need to
intervene, as opposed other places, where we're protecting the ecosystem from
outside and allowing it to recover naturally."
Of course, if you call the Arabs on their arson and destruction, they’ll tell
you they are totally innocent. It was the Jews who did it—burned down their own
farms and forests and homes, just to make Arabs look bad. Or something. The
funny thing is, journalists and college students and horrible UN people believe
them, no matter how flimsy the story, no matter how skimpy the evidence that
anyone but an Arab caused these fires.
One thing we can say for the Arab arsonists is that they are
ecumenical. They’ll target Jews. They’ll target Arabs. They don’t care whose
farms, homes, and forests they burn. The main thing is to say that the Jews did
it.
Israel didn’t ask for October 7. It did ask for its hostages. And when the
hostages didn’t come home, Israel was forced to fight a war it never asked for,
a war it was forced to fight because of the unimaginable horrors wrought by
Arabs against innocent men, women, and children on October 7. Did they really
think we’d look the other way?
Probably not. But it’s all good. Now the Arabs of Gaza and
their legions of antisemitic friends, can talk about Jews committing Apartheid,
genocide and ecocide, in other words all the things PA- and Hamas-ruled Arabs
have done all these years to the Jews. We don’t dare go into their towns but
they walk freely through Jerusalem, ride alongside us on buses, and operate on
us in Israeli hospitals. They’ve systematically and deliberately murdered Jews
with cars, axes, boulders, knives, rockets, bombs, and more. They’ve
systematically and deliberately burned down farms, forests, nature reserves, and
wreaked havoc on Israel’s flora and fauna, Israel’s air and water.
Blaming the Jews for their own misdeeds is not new for the Arabs of Gaza. “Ecocide”
is just a marketing tool. What are they marketing? Jew-hate.
Here in Israel, we also worry about the ecology and the
damage that Arabs have caused in our homeland. But while “ecocide” due to Arab
arson, bombs, rockets, balloons and condoms is a serious problem for Israel, right
now, we worry more about “kinocide.” Also brought
to us by Gaza.
The word “kinocide” originates from a report by the Civil
Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children:
What is Kinocide?
[In] coining the term kinocide, the report exposes the
deliberate, widespread exploitation and destruction of familial bonds to
intensify victims’ suffering, highlighting the profound and lasting harm
inflicted on individuals, communities, and societies. [Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy]
noted that the Dvora Institute calls for urgent international recognition of
the term as it describes a new, distinct international crime against humanity
and presents legal and policy recommendations to close gaps in international
criminal law, ensure accountability, and prevent such atrocities in the future.
GENOCIDE, AS practiced by the Nazis, is directed against a
group of people – “national, ethnical, racial or religious,” according to the
UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention – but kinocide is a specific type of assault
against a group, using the relationship between family members and their
emotional, identity, cultural, symbolic, material and other bonds, as a way to
maximize the intended harm of the attack.
On October 7, Arabs broke the ceasefire with Israel,
breaching its border and committing kinocide. Perhaps some are naïve enough to
think that if the Arabs release our hostages, we’ll lay down our arms. But
we’ve had enough of the Arab Apartheid, genocide, ecocide, and kinocide of our
people, the indigenous people of Israel. This time, they aren’t going to get away
with the damage and the war crimes.
We won’t wait for the UN and their resolutions, or the ICC with its lies and
threats. We will take out this trash. We will take out Amalek. And that’s a
promise. You might even say a covenant.
Purim Sameach.
Bonus! A Purim Drinking Game: Drink shots of bourbon until you don’t know the difference between Trump and Biden. Let me know how it goes. *laughs nefariously*
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
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