Environmental warfare in Gaza

The perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip continues to be transformed into a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a ‘buffer zone’, has been produced along Gaza’s ‘borders’, extending deep into Palestinian residential areas and farmlands- isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian lands by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by unannounced aerial spraying of military herbicides, further placing Israeli apartheid policies within the colonial matrix of chemical warfare. Today, the spraying has destroyed entire swaths of arable land in Gaza, forcibly changing a once-lush Palestinian landscape, and providing the Israeli army with the visibility to target farmers and civilians with lethal force from a distance. This book is a vivid document of this latest stage of Israeli warfare, including original maps, images and visualisations which deepen our understanding of its environmental and human impact. It collects new documents, original archival materials, stills of drone footage, first-hand testimonies of farmers, organisers and protesters, and documents affected vegetation in Gaza as ‘silent witnesses’ to Israeli settler-colonial violence.