By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Relative peace breaking out in the Gaza Strip — a peace
Hamas’s remnants seem determined to disrupt — is the worst possible thing that
could have happened to those who spent the two years since the October 7
massacre crafting an identity around their misapprehension that a “genocide”
was afoot. They’re determined not to let it go.
One entrepreneur catering to that crowd, Grist and
Mother Jones contributor Sophie Hurwitz, has innovated a novel approach. In addition to Israel’s
“genocide” of human beings, the Jewish State is similarly guilty of executing a
genocide against the Gaza Strip’s environment:
According to a new report by the
Arava Institute, an environmental research institute based in Israel, Gaza is
covered with an estimated 61 million tons of rubble, much of which contains
asbestos, unexploded munitions, and unburied human remains. “The environmental
situation in Gaza before October 7 was a disaster,” said Tareq Abuhamed, who
leads the Arava Institute and is Palestinian. Rebuilding even to that prior
state of disaster is likely to take decades.
War is terrible, but it’s hardly remarkable that Israel
targeted free-standing structures its wartime enemy used as cover. Nor is it
particularly surprising to discover that hazardous refuse and waste are not
being properly disposed of or treated. The Gazan people’s hardship is framed in
Hurwitz’s piece as an Israeli plot — one that predates the war Hamas started
with the 10/7 attacks because it throttled access to the water and electricity
the international community believes Israel is obliged to provide its terrorist
tormentors. That’s not new.
What’s truly appalling in Hurwitz’s piece is the
contention proffered by Palestinian researcher Mazin Qumsiyeh, who insisted
that the “functioning society” Gaza enjoyed before the fall of 2023 was
“destroyed in this genocidal, ecocidal war.”
So, it’s “ecocide” now, too. It’s almost like Qumsiyeh is
telling his interlocutor precisely what she wanted to hear and already believed
to be true.
Of course, this is not a novel allegation. Before the
Israeli evacuation in 2005, the environmental degradation that plagues the
maladministered Strip was blamed on its settlers. After Jerusalem literally
dragged every last Israeli out of the Strip, Gaza’s pollution problem has been
blamed on the Israeli blockade. It’s a neat trick.
And yet, those who are not taken in by it don’t have to
look hard to find ample evidence of the degree to which Hamas has been a poor
caretaker of Gaza’s environment — shocking though that may be.
The enterprising can find stories about how caustic car batteries are piled up in unsafe conditions,
left to leak toxic chemicals into the soil (a problem also attributed to
Israel, because it let the batteries in but not out). They could learn about
Israel’s acquiescence to demands that it process Gazan sewage, not just to stop it from leaking over
the border into Israel but to safeguard Palestinians from exposure to
“dangerous pollution.” Indeed, Hamas has even extorted Israel with the prospect
of a great sewage cascade if Jerusalem doesn’t allow fuel and
Qatari cash to flow into the strip. Indeed, within ten years of the Israeli
evacuation, about 95 percent of Gaza’s groundwater was considered unclean, leading the United Nations to conclude
that the Strip would be uninhabitable by 2020.
The notion that the Gaza Strip was a paradisiacal Eden
before the war Hamas started is fanciful. If you were at all curious, it
wouldn’t take you long to disprove the claim that Gaza’s problems began on
October 8. But Israel’s pathological critics are not curious, and the venues
that reinforce and subsist on their rage are not in the business of correcting
their misapprehensions.
For them, the war has not ended because it cannot end. If
it ever did, what would they do with themselves?
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