Toxic Waste From Gaza Begins Spilling Into Israel

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and representatives of the Board of Peace agreed to establish a working group on sanitation and public health for both Israel and Gaza. The group's composition and detailed operational structure have not yet been announced.

This move is seen as a sign that the Israeli government has finally recognized that the consequences of severe ecological destruction in Gaza will soon affect its own territory. Toxic waste left behind by the war, including untreated sewage and contaminated rubble, has now become a public health issue for Israelis themselves.

Gaza and Israel share the Mediterranean Sea, coastal ecosystems, and coastal aquifers. The destruction of electricity systems and sanitation infrastructure has forced over 100,000 cubic meters of raw, untreated sewage to be discharged directly into the sea or on land each day. Due to the region's currents, which mainly move from south to north, this waste drifts straight up into Israeli waters.

The Ashkelon desalination plant in southern Israel has been forced to shut down multiple times due to fecal bacterial contamination from Gaza's sewage. The wastewater also causes harmful algal blooms, which clog and damage the plant's filtration systems, and creates dead zones that make fishing impossible.

Toxins in the sewage, heavy metals, and pathogens are absorbed by marine life. As fish migrate across maritime boundaries, contaminated seafood poses a direct risk to both Palestinian and Israeli consumers. Raw sewage also carries the same pathogens affecting Gaza into the shared marine environment, and the northward flow directly impacts Israel's coastal cities.

While pathogens can survive and travel under certain conditions, contaminated groundwater is unlikely to seep into Israel's municipal water supplies, but it can still affect the shared aquifer and surrounding environment.

Salts and other chemical pollutants can travel much farther and are often a greater long-term concern for aquifers. They can contaminate the shared groundwater systems, reducing water quality and usability over time for irrigation, agriculture, and domestic use.

Recently, Israel has also begun transporting some of the estimated 60 million tons of rubble from Gaza to undisclosed locations inside Israel and the West Bank, potentially bringing contaminants directly to disposal or storage sites. Over the past few weeks, Euro-Med Monitor has recorded about 100 Israeli trucks leaving the Gaza Strip daily carrying debris.

The transported contaminants may include heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and traces of other metals or residues from specialized munitions, as well as white phosphorus particles, unexploded ordnance, industrial chemicals, and asbestos fibers spread from crushed old buildings. Heavy metals in dust and rubble can cause cancer, genetic mutations, fetal malformations, neurotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, and bioaccumulation, posing long-term human and environmental health risks.

The rubble also contains biological material, pathogens, and fluids from decomposing bodies and accumulated organic waste, as well as insects, rodents, and other disease vectors. Airborne dispersal of toxic dust particles, asbestos fibers, and particulate matter degrades air quality, while unexploded materials hidden in the rubble can pose explosion hazards and contaminate the soil.

When dealing with heavily contaminated rubble, international organizations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and regional environmental bodies like the Gaza Debris Management Working Group (DMWG) require that transport follow strict procedures to isolate hazards, including immediately freezing all operations if human remains are found. Moving these materials across borders also requires triggering legal frameworks and strict groundwater protection standards.

Critics point out that bulldozing mass grave sites could destroy crucial evidence of genocide. Additionally, transporting this rubble despite international rules is endangering the health of people in the collection and disposal areas.

If the purpose of this structural disparity is to keep Israel's groundwater strictly protected while shifting the long-term burden of aquifer pollution to Palestinian communities in the West Bank, it is ignoring the risks to Israel's own transport workers and all those living there, including 700,000 illegal settlers.

This is not a problem created by the genocide war. Environmental groups like EcoPeace have long warned that the shared environment creates complete interdependence, meaning humanitarian and sanitation crises in Gaza directly affect Israel's public health.

As early as 1990, former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek openly admitted that his administration had done very little for East Jerusalem beyond extending basic water and sewage pipes, for fear that cholera outbreaks in neglected Arab neighborhoods would spread to West Jerusalem.

Even if Israel lacks the moral standing to fulfill its human rights obligations as the occupying power in addressing the sanitation crisis, it should still understand that without strict adherence to environmental procedures, its own people will suffer consequences similar to those of the Palestinians they are indifferent to and guilty of harming.