Israel's Systematic Destruction of Palestinian Land, Trees, and Water Is Environmental Warfare at Industrial Scale

100,000 olive trees destroyed in 2024 alone, 97% of Gaza's two million olive trees wiped out since October 2023. A decades-long pattern of ecological destruction serves territorial control.

The numbers are staggering and accelerating. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and soldiers have damaged or uprooted 4,500 olive trees in the first month of this year's harvest season alone. Since January 2024, the count stands at 100,000 trees. In Gaza, 97 percent of the strip's two million olive oil trees have been destroyed since October 2023. The cumulative toll since the 1967 occupation exceeds 800,000 trees destroyed before the current escalation even began.

The destruction extends well beyond trees. Israel's national water company, Mekorot, operates a system that reroutes water from Palestinian towns and villages to illegal settlements, routinely cutting supply to Palestinians in summer to guarantee settler access. The water theft has devastated Palestinian agriculture and ecosystems. Meanwhile, Israeli forces and settlers have sprayed Palestinian farmland with pesticides to discourage cultivation, burned vegetation, and stripped topsoil through construction and bulldozing. In Gaza, the environmental destruction has reached a different order of magnitude. Approximately 85 percent of buildings have been destroyed, generating an estimated 70 million tonnes of rubble laced with toxins. Israeli bombardment has dispersed heavy metals — lead, cadmium, arsenic, tungsten, aluminium — along with explosive compounds including TNT, RDX, and perchlorates into soil and groundwater. Continuing bulldozing strips away topsoil rich in organic matter essential for plant growth. The article's author, drawing on personal and family experience, describes a cycle of destruction and replanting that spans generations. The author's grandfather tended an eight-dunam olive grove producing 1,500kg of olive oil per season for four decades. The grove was bulldozed in the 2008 war, replanted, destroyed again in the 2014 war — after which the grandfather died from the shock — replanted again in 2015, harvested for two seasons, bombed in 2021, partially restored with wheat, then devastated again in December 2023. The land now lies beyond the ever-expanding "Yellow Line." The piece argues that Israel's environmental record directly contradicts its "making the desert bloom" narrative deployed at international climate and biodiversity conferences. Pre-Zionist Palestine was agriculturally productive, exporting food across the Ottoman Empire and to Europe. Palestinian farming used drought-resistant local crops and irrigation techniques adapted to local conditions. Zionist settlers imported European species — including eucalyptus, which burns easily and has increased wildfire frequency — drained swamps, rerouted streams, and planted forests over demolished Palestinian villages to erase their traces. The pattern reveals a colonial logic: land as resource to capture and exploit rather than to steward. Water is redirected, soil is poisoned, trees are uprooted, and rubble is left contaminated — all serving the function of making territory uninhabitable for Palestinians. Even in displacement camps, Palestinians maintain small gardens growing mint, basil, and flowers, a counter-signal to the destruction. What makes this environmentally significant beyond the immediate human catastrophe is the long-term contamination. Heavy metals and explosive compounds in Gaza's soil and groundwater will persist for years or decades. The loss of two million olive trees — mature, productive ecosystems — represents a biological and economic asset that would take decades to replace even under ideal conditions, which do not exist.