Spoiling Occupation

On 23 December 2023, international media outlets reported that the Israel Defence Forces had deployed pumps on the eastern coastline of the Gaza strip ( Gayle & Lakhani, 2023 ). The pumps were said to be part of the military plans to flood the tunnels built under the Gaza Strip with millions of gallons of seawater and wastewater. Since the early 1990s, the tunnels have been used by Palestinian militants to bypass Israeli walls and barriers for communication and smuggling weapons ( Weizman, 2007 ). The planned flooding aimed to eliminate the Hamas guerrilla troops reportedly using the infrastructure during the current conflict. However, according to hydrologist Mark Zeitoun, cited by The Guardian , the flooding would most likely “ruin the basic conditions for life in Gaza” ( Zeitoun, 2023 ) and thus constitute the crime of ecocide. The saline and polluted water would inevitably seep through the porous, sandy soil of Gaza and contaminate the main aquifer in the area that supplies 85 per cent of fresh water to over two million of the Palestinian population. This would effectively destroy local agriculture and leave the inhabitants without access to drinkable water. Thus, the plan was less a one-time counterterrorist operation than an element of a longer history of the Israeli occupation practice often referred to as waste siege.