An Environmental Crisis Haunts the Ruins of Gaza

Bloomberg

4 days ago

The bombardment of Gaza has left contaminated soil, blackened water and mounds of garbage spreading disease and pollution; a toxic legacy that will last generations, and extend beyond its borders.
By Fadwa Hodali Caroline Alexander Denise Lu
Before the war, Souk Feras in central Gaza City was packed with rows of small shops and stalls where people came to haggle for fresh local produce: olives, tomatoes and peaches. Today, the market has been replaced by a landfill.
Souk Feras now holds around 200,000 metric tons of trash, according to Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO's Network, PNGO, who is based in Gaza.
Shawa is working with municipalities and United Nations agencies to try to identify new landfill sites, but he says that's not easy — around 45% of Gaza City has been forcibly evacuated, the rest is now effectively inaccessible. Fuel is scarce and roads are destroyed. The trash is 'piling up uncontrollably,' he said.
'The landfills are located right among the population who live in tents, without hygiene supplies or water,' Shawa said. 'There's no medication or medical support. It's painful now, but it's going to leave long-term effects on public health.'
Souk Feras is one of nearly 350 sites in Gaza where waste has been piling up since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October 2023, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of high resolution satellite imagery from June 2025. In total, these new trash sites cover more than 1 square kilometer (0.4 square miles) of land. Given the limitations of satellite imagery, this is almost certainly an undercount, and it doesn't measure the volume of trash at each site.
Many of these new waste dumps are close to where people now live. Around 60% of the areas now covered in trash are close to tents and 15% are near water, sanitation or hygiene sites.
After nearly two years of chaos and bombardment, the environmental cost of the war is overwhelming. Bloomberg's analysis of informal waste sites in Gaza shows how the collapse of services, damage to infrastructure and the displacement of people have led to an environmental disaster — one which is compounding the humanitarian crisis in the territory. The ever-growing piles of trash are just one part of a wider catastrophe.
Satellite imagery and research by NGOs and international aid organizations show that infrastructure and services — already weak due to years of mismanagement under Hamas — have broken down or been destroyed. That has left Gaza's coastal waters clogged with human waste and industrial chemicals. The single shallow aquifer that supplies the majority of the territory's water is at risk of contamination. In the towns and cities, collapsing buildings have left at least 55 million metric tons of rubble, according to UN estimates, and released toxic dust and smoke into the air. Expended munitions have leached heavy metals and other pollutants into the soil.
Israel says that it does everything it can to avoid environmental damage.
'This is a complex environmental disaster in every dimension, and its effects aren't just for today. You've got toxic leachate from the waste dripping onto people,' Shawa said. 'We've lost water wells, boreholes, and desalination stations. There's nothing left that represents life in Gaza anymore.'
The conflict began after gunmen from Hamas, which ruled the strip and is designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages, 50 of whom are still being held in Gaza. Israel believes fewer than half of the hostages are still alive. The fighting has killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians and injured about 140,000 in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, which doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Experts say the toxic legacy of the war will linger for generations, overshadowing any of the plans that the region's key powers have proposed for the territory. And, it will inevitably have consequences far beyond Gaza's borders, as drug-resistant pathogens emerge from the polluted soil and unsanitary conditions, and toxic chemicals spread on the wind, in water, by migrating wildlife and the movement of people and vehicles.
'What happens in the environment in Gaza isn't restricted to Gaza,' Doug Weir, head of The Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK-based research group, said. 'All the different issues… they rarely respect boundaries.'
Black Water
When Basil Yasin feels it's safe enough to leave the tented camp he reluctantly calls home, he walks along the sand dunes in Deir al-Balah to look out at the Mediterranean Sea.
Before the war, Yasin, a 56-year-old environmentalist, often visited the area, in the middle of the territory's 40-kilometer-long shoreline. He felt hemmed in in Gaza City in the north or Rafah to the south, but at Deir al-Balah, he had 'a strange sense of freedom' — even as he worked at testing the water for bacteria and pollutants.
Now, Yasin, a field coordinator for EcoPeace Middle East, a regional environmental organization, feels only despair. All along the coast, and especially in the afternoons when the tide is low, the water is 'blackened by raw sewage,' he said.
Access to clean water has been a perennial concern in Gaza, which relies heavily on groundwater from the aquifer that runs the length of the territory. Supplies have been dwindling and deteriorating for years, mainly due to overuse.
Gaza is densely populated, with 5,500 people per square kilometer before the war. As residents sunk boreholes for water and agriculture, they helped deplete the aquifer, which led to seawater intrusion. Contamination from fertilizers and pesticides from agriculture, as well as wastewater seeping from badly maintained infrastructure exacerbated the problem.
Mismanagement under Hamas — and four previous rounds of conflict between the group and Israel since 2007 — meant that the water network was already in a poor state before the war. The last nearly two years of fighting have pushed the system from a slow crisis to total collapse. Within the first four months of the war, 60% of the infrastructure, including pumping stations, desalination plants and sewage treatment facilities, had been destroyed. By February 2025, virtually the entire network was out of service.
The population is now crowded into areas totalling around 51 square kilometers, just 14% of the territory's land. Photos, videos and local testimony show that raw effluent and waste water flows through streets and across farmland. That mixes with heavy metals, including lead, mercury and cadmium, which have leaked from unexploded ordnance and other war remnants — in particular, the rooftop solar panels that became popular in Gaza in recent years to mitigate against chronic power outages.
Suspected Contaminated Debris Detected Across Gaza
Some of this toxic stew evaporates, leaving behind high concentrations of pollutants. Some of it forms large, stagnant pools in low-lying areas. About 84,000 cubic meters of sewage was ending up in the Mediterranean Sea each day in July, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
Where the soil is sandy and highly permeable, pollutants seep into the aquifer, further compromising underground water reserves. Nearly all of Gaza's trees are gone — either through the Israeli aerial and ground campaigns, or because Palestinians were forced to chop them down for heating or cooking. That deforestation, together with military earthworks that have compacted the soil, is raising the risk of long-term desertification, according to UNEP.
An IDF spokesperson said that the military does not intentionally harm agricultural land, tries to mitigate environmental impact 'absent operational necessity,' and 'makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential collateral damage in its strikes and operations.' Hamas routinely operates from within orchards and agricultural land, the IDF said.
The scale of the bombardment has made it hard to assess the extent of the environmental damage that has been done. According to Abeer Butmeh, a coordinator at PNGO, which has offices in both Gaza and the West Bank, the larger of the two Palestinian territories, it's impossible to test water, air or soil in Gaza, and coordinating sampling with Israeli authorities is difficult.
Trash Piles Found Above Gaza's Main Water Source
'In Gaza, there isn't a single device for testing,' said Butmeh, whose organization is a coalition of environmental and developmental groups, including ActionAid. 'All universities and labs were hit, leaving no laboratory operational.'
Many of the territory's specialists are also gone. Yasin's other Gaza-based colleague, an engineer, was killed along with 38 other people in an airstrike that destroyed an apartment block in 2023. Yasin still receives a salary, but his work wound down about a year into the war — after the house he had just finished building for his family was flattened in the air raids.
'Safe Zones'
Hani Abu Tarifa, 40, has been collecting trash for most of his life. He has moved around the strip 10 times since his home was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, and currently lives in a tent in Al Qarara Port with his wife, four children and parents. He counts himself more fortunate than most — he still has a job.
Two UN organizations — the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Unicef — are coordinating efforts to collect the trash across parts of the territory where people are allowed to shelter, paying locals to collect refuse every day with donkeys and carts and dump it as far as possible from camps in designated spots.
Abu Tarifa and three others pick up small plastic bags left outside tents from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and take them to a landfill roughly a mile away. As the war has dragged on, he says he's been struck by how the type of garbage he picks up has changed.
In the early days, his cart would overflow with vegetable peelings and table scraps. He'd also find food left by animals, and their excrement. But today it's mostly cans. Less than 5% of Gaza's farmland was usable for cultivation as of April, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the UN Satellite Center. The prices of staples have skyrocketed, with a kilogram of flour costing around $41, according to the World Food Programme. For his work collecting trash for Unicef, Abu Tarifa earns 800 shekels, or $239, every 50 days — just under $5 a day.
With Israel accused by the UN and aid groups of restricting the entry of food and water, many families are surviving on just one meal a day — rice, lentils, or pasta, with no access to bread, fresh vegetables or enough protein. More than 100 aid organizations, including Oxfam International and Doctors Without Borders, said in an open letter on July 23 that 'mass starvation' was spreading in Gaza.
Abu Tarifa says he rarely sees animals anymore. On days of intense shelling, trash either isn't picked up at all, or it's dumped in large containers placed in the camp, for collection later on. Before the war, garbage was collected daily, he said. 'The situation is very difficult nowadays.'
The humanitarian and environmental crises in Gaza overlap and reinforce each other.
Forced into refugee camps in ever shrinking 'safe zones' declared by the Israeli military, people have no choice but to dig holes for sewage that are further contaminating the groundwater supply — leading to outbreaks of waterborne diseases, including dysentery and Hepatitis A.
Tents Identified Side-by-Side With Mounting Waste
'In a place like Gaza where there is such an intense humanitarian crisis, people wonder whether it's right to talk about the environment, but it's a false dichotomy,' Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, said. 'It's really clear that so much environmental damage has been caused that it is undermining the basic life support systems that people rely on — whether it's clean air, water for drinking or land for agriculture.'
'Russian Roulette'
In Israel, authorities are aware that the environmental devastation in Gaza has consequences that cannot be constrained by the border fence. Hospitals are under instruction to monitor patients for so-called 'super-bugs' — bacteria, fungi, parasites or viruses that are resistant to medication. Under the protocols, war injuries are to be treated with specialized antibiotics.
War is often a breeding ground for these pathogens. When people are forced from their homes into crowded and unsanitary conditions, infections spread fast. People weakened by lack of food and clean water are more susceptible to illness, and the destruction of medical infrastructure means that they receive inadequate care. Infection control, monitoring and surveillance collapses. Without access to a range of medications, doctors overuse or wrongly prescribe drugs.
The destruction of war can even cause bacteria to evolve. Heavy metals are naturally antibacterial, and when they are released into the environment, bacteria exposed to them sometimes undergo genetic changes to survive. Pathogens can linger in the environment for decades after fighting ends, and people can carry them across borders.
Very high levels of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, were reported in Gaza before the war by organizations including Medicins Sans Frontières.
Dorit Nitzan, a professor in the School of Public Health at Israel's Ben-Gurion University said she has 'no doubt' they're even higher now. Although there haven't been many cases in Israel so far, 'we see it in the military personnel, we see it in hospitals,' she said.
'I am proud of the Israeli protocols… I think that many countries will learn from us in the near future how to manage very complicated battlefield wounds,' she said. 'What I'm worried about is Gaza.'
Nitzan worked in Ukraine as a WHO emergencies director following Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. She was among a group of leading Israeli health experts who last year called for a ceasefire in Gaza in an open letter published in the Haaretz newspaper, after a toddler in the Palestinian territory was partly paralyzed by the highly infectious polio virus. The letter said the case was a reminder that 'pathogens and toxic exposures know no borders.' Israel agreed to several humanitarian pauses in the fighting so that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could be vaccinated.
Environmental experts Bloomberg spoke to said that other pollutants released by the conflict can lead to public health concerns. They said that carcinogenic substances and toxic particles can rise into the atmosphere where they can be carried in the wind or fall as rain, that animals can spread contaminants, and that currents can move polluted water around the Mediterranean Sea.
The cross-border nature of the crisis means that cooperation and information sharing between health authorities is vital.
Health officials from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are still collaborating; as are UN OCHA and COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry unit overseeing civilian needs in Gaza. But officials in the region told Bloomberg that the conversations have become less warm and more complex since the war began.
Decision makers are playing 'Russian roulette with health on both sides,' Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace in Tel Aviv, said. 'Animosity and a complete lack of trust has put in peril cooperation between the governments essential for water, energy, and environment issues.'
The Israeli Ministry of Health didn't respond to a request for comment.
Restoration
During one of Yasin's last big projects for EcoPeace, in 2022, he took school groups to meet farmers in Abassan, south of Deir al-Balah, where he was concerned by irrigation with greywater — household wastewater — and the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides. The teenagers, he said, enjoyed working with the farmers to help find new ways to cultivate their grains and orchards. 'Some of them became teachers and environmental engineers, imagine. The environmental and water situation was improving, and heading in the right direction — I noticed that each visit. I was really very happy.'
Those fields no longer exist, and all his work on keeping Gaza's water clean is gone. 'Unfortunately everything is over,' he said.
Wadi Gaza, a fragile wetland and nature reserve to the north of Deir al-Balah, had suffered from years of neglect, but grassroots projects backed by international organizations were starting to make a difference. Now, it's a wasteland. Other ecosystems across Gaza have also been destroyed, including orchards, olive groves and the vast majority of the territory's tree cover.
Nearly All of Gaza's Trees Have Been Destroyed
UNEP has warned that simply making a comprehensive assessment of the damage, and then removing contaminants, might take years. The UN estimated in February that the reconstruction of Gaza will cost at least $53 billion and last around a decade.
Since the war began, Yasin has moved around eight times, seeking shelter. In June, he described displacement as 'a kind of living death,' but said he was resolved to stay in Gaza after the fighting ends and rebuild.
As the IDF began expanding their military campaign into Deir al-Balah this week, Yasin said the extent of the destruction makes it harder for him to see a future in Gaza.
'The situation is worse than ever,' he said. 'I never imagined that it would get to this point.'
Photos edited by Maria Wood With assistance from Salma El Wardany Marissa Newman
Methodology
Imagery Collation
For comparative analysis, we constructed two strip-wide, high-resolution satellite imagery mosaics; a pre-conflict period using images from May and June 2023, and a current period with images from June 2025.
Each mosaic was assembled by stitching 10 separate image acquisitions to ensure complete and cloud-free coverage, and we performed a color correction process known as histogram matching. This procedure corrects for atmospheric differences and variations in sun angle between the collects, resulting in a seamless and consisent dataset.
Mapping Waste Sites
We mapped waste sites in the June 2025 satellite mosaic by developing and applying a specialized deep learning model.
Initial labeling was informed by geolocated sites from War and Garbage in Gaza, a July 2024 report by the peace organization PAX. Many of these sites had moved or expanded since the report's publication, and we conducted a comprehensive manual labeling effort, identifying additional sites by closely examining the satellite imagery. We then fine-tuned a ResNet18 semantic segmentation model to identify and outline areas corresponding to waste sites across the entire 2025 mosaic.
Following the automated detection, every computer-generated result was manually validated to ensure the highest possible accuracy. This review process involved removing false positives, which primarily consisted of rubble fields.
Our analysis cannot measure the volume of trash at a site, distinguish smaller waste sites and identify trash that is mixed directly with rubble. The resulting map of waste sites should be considered a conservative estimate, and the true extent is likely greater.
Mapping Tents
To map the proliferation of tents, a proxy for displaced populations, we employed a machine learning classification model. The model was trained on a multi-temporal dataset created by 'stacking' the pre-conflict (2023) and current (2025) image mosaics. Training points were manually labeled by visually identifying tents and tent clusters in the 2025 imagery. All automated detections were subjected to a rigorous manual validation process to confirm their accuracy and minimize errors.