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At some level, it wasn't very complicated for me. Simply put, I was horrified by the Hamas assault on Israel: the slaughter of kids attending a music festival, the killing of old folks and children in kibbutzes, and the kidnapping of about 240 people (again including the elderly and children). That was in no uncertain terms a first-class horror.
But when, only a couple of days later, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel's response would be to cut off all -- yes, all! -- electricity, food, fuel, and water to Gaza, I knew something was deeply wrong. Having been brutally attacked by a terror group based in Gaza, your decision to cut off 2.3 million people living on that 25-mile-long strip of land from everything that keeps us going, no matter what any of them think, no matter whether they're 90 years old or 10 years old, indicates that something is deeply astray. No good, no justice, not even reasonable revenge can come from such a decision, followed, of course, by the devastating act of bombing the area and all its inhabitants, including its children, back to the stone age. The figure that recently stunned me and put the Israeli response to October 7th in horrifying context was this: it's now estimated that, because supplies are so lacking and the Gazan hospital system has been so thoroughly decimated, more than 1,000 children there have had limbs amputated without anesthesia.
And it's only grown worse as time passes. In fact, as TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank reports today, all of what I've described above isn't the half of it. The Netanyahu regime has taken out after more or less anything that might be of use or value in Gaza, anything that might make life meaningful, including that area's precious olive groves and its environment. Honestly, what a first-class nightmare -- supported nearly in full by the Biden administration in my own "indispensable" country, which has, among other things, been shipping arms to Israel like mad, while circumventing Congress. What a genuine hell on earth! For shame! Tom
The Killing of Gaza's Environment
Or How to Create an Unlivable Hellscape on One Strip of Land
By Joshua Frank
On a picturesque beach in central Gaza, a mile north of the now-flattened Al-Shati refugee camp, long black pipes snake through hills of white sand before disappearing underground. An image released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shows dozens of soldiers laying pipelines and what appear to be mobile pumping stations that are to take water from the Mediterranean Sea and hose it into underground tunnels. The plan, according to various reports, is to flood the vast network of underground shafts and tunnels Hamas has reportedly built and used to carry out its operations.
"I won't talk about specifics, but they include explosives to destroy and other means to prevent Hamas operatives from using the tunnels to harm our soldiers," said IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi. "[Any] means which give us an advantage over the enemy that [uses the tunnels], deprives it of this asset, is a means that we are evaluating using. This is a good idea--
While Israel is already test-running its flood strategy, it's not the first time Hamas's tunnels have been subjected to sabotage by seawater. In 2013, neighboring Egypt began flooding Hamas-controlled tunnels that were allegedly being used to smuggle goods between the country's Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. For more than two years, water from the Mediterranean was flushed into the tunnel system, wreaking havoc on Gaza's environment. Groundwater supplies were quickly polluted with salt brine and, as a result, the dirt became saturated and unstable, causing the ground to collapse and killing numerous people. Once fertile agricultural fields were transformed into salinated pits of mud, and clean drinking water, already in short supply in Gaza, was further degraded.
Israel's current strategy to drown Hamas's tunnels will no doubt cause similar, irreparable damage. "It is important to keep in mind," warns Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, "that we are not just talking about water with a high salt content here -- seawater along the Mediterranean coast is also polluted with untreated wastewater, which is continuously discharged into the Mediterranean from Gaza's dysfunctional sewage system."
This, of course, appears to be part of a broader Israeli objective -- not just to dismantle Hamas's military capabilities but to further degrade and destroy Gaza's imperiled aquifers (already polluted with sewage that's leaked from dilapidated pipes). Israeli officials have openly admitted their goal is to ensure that Gaza will be an unlivable place once they end their merciless military campaign.
"We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said shortly after the Hamas attack of October 7th. "We will eliminate everything -- they will regret it."
And Israel is now keeping its promise.
As if its indiscriminate bombing, which has already damaged or destroyed up to 70% of all homes in Gaza, weren't enough, filling those tunnels with polluted water will ensure that some of the remaining residential buildings will suffer structural problems, too. And if the ground is weak and insecure, Palestinians will have trouble rebuilding.
Flooding tunnels with polluted groundwater "will cause an accumulation of salt and the collapse of the soil, leading to the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes in the densely populated strip," says Abdel-Rahman al-Tamimi, director of the Palestinian Hydrologists Group, the largest NGO monitoring pollution in the Palestinian territories. His conclusion couldn't be more stunning: "The Gaza Strip will become a depopulated area, and it will take about 100 years to get rid of the environmental effects of this war."
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