Skunk Water: Israel's Stink Weapon and Its Global Commercial Strategy

In late September, a stench spread across Gaza City overnight. At first, residents searched for the source around them, wondering whether it came from a toilet or a sleeping child. Then reports of the same stench began arriving from across the city. The reports said Israeli aircraft had dropped hundreds of packets containing foul-smelling substances onto populated areas.

One witness told AJ+: "Today, all of us in Gaza City woke up to a literally rotten, foul smell… Israeli drones are spraying this stench to pollute the air. Even the air?"

In fact, Israel has spent nearly two decades turning stench into a weapon against Palestinians.

Skunk water, Israel's flagship meteorological weapon now reportedly being used in Gaza, was developed in 2004 by the Israeli company Odortec in cooperation with the Technology Development Bureau of the Israeli Police, and was first deployed against Palestinian protesters in Nilin in 2008. It is classified as an "odor-based non-lethal weapon" for crowd control and can be fired from water cannons or dropped from drones.

From Nilin, its use spread across the occupied West Bank. It became a regular feature of protests in Bilin, Kafr Qaddum and Nabi Saleh, where Israeli forces repeatedly used it against Palestinians demonstrating against settlements, land seizure and movement restrictions. In 2011, Israeli forces fired tear gas and skunk water at unarmed protesters attending the funeral of a 28-year-old youth killed by the Israeli army in Nabi Saleh, after which they were on their way to a village spring that had been "seized by the neighboring Halamish settlement." Similar incidents were reported there in 2012 and 2013.

The practice quickly spread beyond West Bank villages. In 2013, activists protesting the closure of Shuhada Street in Hebron and journalists covering the protest were sprayed with the foul liquid. The following year, Israeli police drove a skunk truck through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, spraying homes, streets and schools. In at-Tur, four schools were affected, forcing about 4,500 students to stay home because of the smell.

By 2018, Israel also deployed it from the air. During the Great March of Return, the Israeli military used Shoko drones to spray the foul liquid on Palestinian protesters in Gaza from a payload of plastic bags.

For the Israeli authorities, its usefulness goes far beyond crowd control. Certainly, spray it at a protest and people will disperse. But spray it on streets, homes and neighborhoods, and it becomes a tool that makes Palestinian space unlivable.

That partly explains Israel's long-standing enthusiasm for skunk water. There is another reason: Israel sells to the world the methods it developed to control Palestinians.

When skunk water was first deployed in 2008, there were reports that Israeli police "placed great hopes on turning it into a commercial project and selling it to foreign law enforcement agencies." Director David Ben Harosh even went on television holding a "one-liter bottle of dirty green liquid" and declared: "It is completely harmless, you can even drink it."

Its use against Palestinians – whom Israel has long portrayed as the embodiment of pathological evil – also reinforced the country's global reputation as a pioneer in counterinsurgency and law enforcement technology. Each deployment provided another demonstration of Israel's expertise in controlling populations it presents as uniquely dangerous.

By then, Israel had already begun exporting it. In 2007, Beit Alfa Technologies supplied skunk water to the South African Police Service along with "water cannons and riot control equipment." These were later used against protesters during the 2015 Fees Must Fall protests.

In 2017, India's Central Reserve Police Force tested skunk water for crowd control in places including Jammu and Kashmir. The Who Profits research center also said it was approached by a company seeking help contacting Odortec to buy the liquid for sale to Colombian police.

In the United States, Mistral Security supplies skunk water, claiming that "the skunk odor immediately stops individuals and crowds while allowing law enforcement to take control with minimal injuries and casualties."

The company's marketing makes the connection to Palestine unusually explicit: its website uses a photo of Israeli forces deploying skunk water against Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinians affected by the weapon become part of the evidence that it works effectively.

After the 2014 Ferguson protests, Mistral supplied skunk water to several US police departments. These included the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in Missouri, which purchased the liquid in 2015 after the Ferguson protests.

A Quartz report on the shipment to Missouri captured what makes the weapon attractive. "Poisoning a place," it observed, can destroy people's will to "reside, gather, protest, or even record a place" until it is cleaned. It described skunk water as potentially "a new system for maintaining apartheid."

So what Israel sells is not just a foul liquid. Skunk water comes with the reputation Israel has built over decades of controlling Palestinians: a state presented as having unique experience in suppressing unrest, counterinsurgency and dealing with populations deemed dangerous. Palestinians are central to that brand. Their repression proves the technology; their demonization helps justify the expertise built around controlling them.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.