A potential plan through Israel flooding the Hamas tunnel network with seawater risks “ruining the basic living conditions in Gaza”, one of the elements of the crime of genocide, a senior hydrologist told the Guardian.
Environmentalists have warned that the strategy – to which Israel has yet to commit – risks causing an ecological disaster that will leave Gaza with no potable water and possibly ruining what little agriculture there is in the 141 square mile area.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to water, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, compared it to the legend of Romans salting the fields of Carthage to make the territory of their ancient rival uninhabitable. The rapporteur for human rights and the environment, David Boyd, said the damage to Gaza’s only water supply would be “catastrophic” for the environment and human rights.
Media reports, photographs and satellite images indicate that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have set up pumps at al-Shati refugee camp on the eastern coastline of the Gaza Strip, which they can use to pump millions of liters of seawater into the tunnels used by the militant group.
Israeli soldiers reportedly began pumping seawater into the underground network last week in an attempt to drive Hamas militants above ground and deny them a key strategic tool.
The environmental consequences can be far-reaching. According to a study by the US military academy West Point, there were 1,300 tunnels spanning 310 miles (500 km) in Gaza at the start of the war in October. It is estimated that it would take 1.5m cubic meters of water to fill them completely.
Mark Zeitoun, director of the Geneva Water Hub and professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, said seawater pumped into the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that criss-cross Gaza’s porous, sandy soil will inevitably seep into the aquifer on which its 2.3 million residents rely for about 85% of their water.
Zeitoun, who worked as a water engineer for the UN in the occupied Palestinian territoriessaid the aquifer was already heavily contaminated by wastewater and seawater infiltration caused by years of over-extraction.
“If you add more seawater directly, right through the sand in the aquifer, it’s not going to turn a top-quality resource into a vulnerable resource, it’s going to turn a vulnerable resource into a catastrophic one,” Zeitoun said.
He said the pollution would be such that the current ambient level reverse osmosis desalination methods used by Palestinians in Gaza to treat their water would no longer be feasible.
“It will ruin the living conditions of everyone in Gaza,” he said. “I say the living conditions because I think it is one of the elements of genocide within the UN convention, the partial or complete physical destruction of the living conditions of any people.
“Flooding the freshwater aquifer with seawater would go against every norm that humanity has ever developed, including the environmental aspects of international humanitarian law/rules of war and the recent principles on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict and all the progress made to criminalize damage to the natural environment: ecocide.”
Wim Zwijnenberg, a researcher from the Dutch NGO Pax for Peace, which investigates the environmental impacts of war, warned of additional dangers. “We don’t know what is stored in the tunnels,” he said.
“There are reports floating around, which have not been verified, but are cited by some sources [that] approximately 20,000 liters of fuel are stored in the tunnels. So you have all those types of hydrocarbons that can potentially also affect the soil and end up in the aquifer and groundwater.”
The flooding of the tunnels will also pose risks to the integrity of the land on which the communities of Gaza, the world’s most densely populated area, are built, Zwijnenberg warned. If they were to collapse under built-up areas, it could also bring down whatever buildings remain above them.
If fully implemented, the IDF’s tunnel flooding plan would be the latest step in a long history of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian water supplies. Even before the damage to water infrastructure caused by the latest bombing of Gaza, supplies were uncertain for people in the area and in the West Bank, said Hadeel Ikhmais, the head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Authority for Environmental Quality.
In the West Bank, Palestinians have no access to surface water, and must buy water from the Israelis. Israeli settlers and soldiers attacked water supplies in the West Bank about three times a month between January 2022 and mid-2023.
In Gaza, the groundwater aquifer is not recharging sufficiently to cope with demand due to a rising population and climate impacts including drought and higher temperatures. In the latest war, desalination plants, water harvesting and water treatment infrastructure was targetedwhich leads to waste being dumped into the sea.
“The disposal of waste water in the sea makes desalination much more challenging. By targeting water supplies, Israel is trying to make Gaza unlivable for Palestinians,” Ikhmais said.
The UN Environment Program said it had seen reports of Israel starting to pump water into Gaza’s tunnels. In response to the Guardian, a spokesperson gave a similar assessment of the potential consequences.
“The coastal aquifer, an underground natural reservoir that runs from the Carmel Mountain Range in the north to the Sinai Peninsula in the south, and the already fragile ecosystem of Gaza must be protected so there is no impact on agriculture, industry and the environment does not. , and so that people can use the groundwater safely,” said the spokesperson.
“Any method used by the warring parties during the conflict must take all precautions not to harm civilians, including affecting access to water and food sources.”
The Israeli government and IDF did not respond to requests for comment.
