For hundreds of years, the people of Palestine’s coast have been sustained by the Mediterranean Sea. Fishing provides sustenance and employment, while the shoreline offers respite and joy. The pattern on the Palestinian keffiyeh, a traditional headscarf, is often said to represent a fishing net.
Since Israeli occupation began more than half a century ago, Palestinians have kept their longstanding relationship with the Mediterranean alive. Yet Israel’s war on the coastal territory of Gaza has brought an unprecedented ecological crisis to this maritime region. Pollutants, like chemicals from munitions and wastewater from destroyed infrastructure, flow from land to sea, seeping into water that runs off into the Mediterranean. These toxins are faced first by the people of Gaza, but marine currents spread them to the coasts of Israel, Türkiye, Cyprus, and other nearby countries.
Since 2024, calls from human rights groups like CODEPINK and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and watchdog groups like Forensic Architecture, have been growing to define Israel’s violence against Gaza not only as a genocide, but as an ecocide, or the act of causing intentional, severe harm to the environment. Amid hopes for a true ceasefire, the long-term consequences for the sea—and the people whose lives intertwine with it—are beginning to emerge.
“Natural heritage and cultural heritage is being attacked by the colonizers,” says Mazin Qumsiyeh, founder and director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability and the Palestine Museum of Natural History. “It’s very difficult for the people here in Palestine to see this destroyed—this culture, this heritage.”
The coast in northern Gaza in July 2023 and at present.
Israel’s attacks have decimated Gaza’s fishing boats and infrastructure, according to a report from Israeli nonprofit Gisha. Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza has been in place since 2007, but before the current war, fishing was permitted in a limited section of sea. Now, all fishing at sea, and any entry to the water, is prohibited. A few people still try to catch what they can in shallow waters, but Israeli forces have fired at these few remaining fishers, killing some of them. Gaza’s people have been forced to turn to unconventional sources of sustenance, such as eating endangered sea turtles to supplement the loss of fish.
With most food sources in Gaza disrupted or cut off, any sustenance is precious. Yet the local seafood, while better than starvation, is contaminated with sewage and other hazardous material. Since bombs have destroyed Gaza’s limited wastewater infrastructure, raw sewage now flows into the sea at an unprecedented rate.
“By gravity, all wastewater that is basically either collected in ponds or going through valleys and mainly Wadi Gaza, is going to end up in the Mediterranean Sea,” says Nada Majdalani, the Palestine director at EcoPeace Middle East, which is a cooperative organization of Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian environmentalists. “All six wastewater treatment plants have been reported completely damaged, as well as the entire seventeen or sixteen pumps.”
Harmful bacteria and viruses—even polio—have been found in the wastewater now flowing from Gaza. That wastewater not only contaminates food, but also threatens the region’s water supply when it enters groundwater or runs off into the sea. Doctors Without Borders has reported that Israel is preventing authorities in Gaza from repairing desalination plants damaged by war, and the limited freshwater that remains now spreads disease due to wastewater contamination. Palestine, Israel, and other countries in the Middle East rely on desalination to convert seawater into freshwater for drinking and other uses. When the seawater is polluted, so is what comes out of the desalination plants.
Currents can carry pollutants throughout the Mediterranean. While deepwater currents are hard to track, some surface currents travel north and east from Gaza, reaching Israel and Lebanon, says disaster risk specialist Elaine Donderer.
Other threats begin on dry land. “There’s wastewater, but then there’s this massive concern about the rubble and the crushed particles from destroyed buildings, which have a huge chemical and heavy metal loading,” says Donderer.
The bombing is itself a major source of pollutants, and the remains of weapons and unexploded bombs also leach contaminants into soil and water, eventually flowing into the Mediterranean.
“In Gaza, of course, the situation is much worse than other parts of the Mediterranean, but it is one sea, so one part of it being polluted is going to impact other parts,” says Qumsiyeh. “It’s all connected. If we have pollution on land, it ends up in the sea.”
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Ramez Habboub (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A port off the coast of Gaza, March 2014.
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UNRWA
Aerial view of destruction in a refugee camp on the coast of Gaza, July 2024.
Ali Shaath, the Palestinian official appointed with U.S. support to administer new leadership in Gaza, recently proposed that rubble from Gaza actually be pushed into the Mediterranean, in spite of pollutants like asbestos. This could solve the immediate debris problem, and create new artificial land for the crowded enclave—but it would shift even more pollution offshore.
“It’s not just stone and dust, it’s toxic waste, and you need to dispose of it properly,” says Donderer. She adds that this rubble could poison and suffocate seabed sponge gardens and seagrass meadows, which fortify the coast against erosion while supporting fish and other marine life.
“I believe if anything of that sort needs to be done, a thorough environmental assessment needs to be done to make sure that the sediments and marine ecology [are] not impacted,” says Majdalani.
Under a lasting ceasefire, restoration can finally begin—a process that will require research to fully assess the damage. But this poses an immense challenge, as Israel’s attacks have destroyed Gaza’s research institutions.
Right now, “we cannot know for sure what is the level of pollution in soil, and therefore the level of pollution of the runoff towards the Mediterranean Sea,” says Majdalani. If research were allowed and supported in Gaza, researchers could track the movement of contamination from land to sea and through the marine food chain. Sonar could locate submerged munitions and military waste, which release pollutants straight into seawater.
Until restoration is possible, those contaminants will continue to threaten the region’s seafood, as well as its drinking water, as they can’t be removed by desalination plants.
“That’s why it also should be an issue for Israel just as much as it is for the Palestinians,” says Donderer. “There is no political boundary in nature.”
Cooperation and collaboration will be essential to reconstruction, according to Majdalani. “There needs to be a regional understanding that the Mediterranean Sea, and the entire basin, is basically at stake,” she says.
The people and ecology of Gaza bear the severest harm. Yet the damage of the war is already traveling far beyond its ecosystem of origin, by land and by sea.
“This is important, that wars and conflict are not a problem in the regions they occur only,” says Qumsiyeh. “They’re a problem for the whole planet.”