The Israeli campaign in Gaza has wrought devastation on an overwhelming scale, not just on the Palestinian people and infrastructure, but on the ecological future of Gaza and southern Israel as well.
In response to the environmental catastrophe, Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry has announced its new ‘Green South’ initiative, which seeks to revive areas of southern Israel with green building, new recycling plants, and treatment of farmlands contaminated by the war.1
But while there are plans to promote sustainable Israeli farming on the Gaza border, and even re-settle the strip with green Israeli towns, there are no long-term plans to cease the violence that causes this environmental destruction – much less to enfranchise the Palestinian civilians most directly affected by it.2
Instead, Palestinians are forced to either flee their homeland as refugees, or else continue to be killed en masse, whether through bombardment or forced starvation.
This has led some, including Gustavo Petro, the first leftwing president of Colombia, to call the campaign in Gaza a blueprint towards
