Catastrophic danger of sea water flooding of Hamas tunnels called

Israel’s potential plan to flood Hamas’ network of tunnels with seawater risks “destroying basic life conditions in Gaza,” an element of the crime of genocide, a senior hydrologist told The Guardian.

Environmental experts have warned that the strategy Israel plans to pursue risks causing an environmental disaster that would leave Gaza without potable water and destroy what little agriculture there is in the 141-square-meter area. mile.

UN Special Rapporteur on the right to water Pedro Arrojo-Agudo compared it to the legend of how the Romans salted the fields of Carthage to make the territory of their ancient rival uninhabitable. Human rights and environment rapporteur David Boyd said damaging 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 installed pumps in the al-Shati refugee camp on the east coast of the Gaza Strip that they could use to pump millions of gallons of seawater into tunnels used by the militant group.

Israeli soldiers reportedly began testing seawater injection into an underground network last week in an attempt to push Hamas militants to the surface and deny them a critical strategic tool.

The environmental consequences could be far-reaching, notes The Guardian. At the start of the war in October, there were 1,300 tunnels in Gaza spanning more than 310 miles (500 km), according to a study conducted by the US military academy West Point. It was estimated that 1.5 million cubic meters of water would be required to completely fill them.

Marc Zeitoun, director of the Geneva Water Center and professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, warns that seawater pumped into hundreds of kilometers of tunnels cutting through Gaza’s porous sandy soil will inevitably seep into the aquifer from which Gaza’s 2.3 million residents get about 85% of their water. .

Zeitoun, who worked as a water engineer for the United Nations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, notes that the aquifer was already heavily polluted by sewage and seawater intrusion caused by years of excessive depletion.

“If you add more seawater directly, directly through the sand into the aquifer, it won’t turn a superior resource into a vulnerable resource, it will turn a vulnerable resource into a catastrophic resource,” Zeitoun states.

The expert argues that the pollution will be such that current district-level reverse osmosis desalination methods used by Palestinians in Gaza to purify their water will no longer be feasible.

“This would destroy the living conditions of everyone in Gaza,” the specialist warns. – I say “living conditions” because I think that this is one of the elements of genocide under the UN convention, the partial or complete physical destruction of the conditions necessary for the life of any people. Flooding a freshwater aquifer with seawater would be contrary to every rule ever developed by humanity, including the environmental aspects of international humanitarian law/rules of war and recent environmental principles in armed conflict, as well as all progress made towards the criminalization of harm natural environment: ecocide.”

Wim Zwijnenberg, a researcher at Pax for Peace, a Dutch NGO that studies the environmental impact of war, says there are additional dangers. “We don’t know what’s in the tunnels,” he admits.

“There are rumors, unconfirmed but quoted by some sources, that about 20,000 gallons of fuel are stored in the tunnels. So you have all these types of hydrocarbons that could potentially also impact the soil and end up in the aquifer and groundwater.”

Flooding the tunnels would also threaten the integrity of the soil on which communities in Gaza, the world’s most densely populated area, are built, Zwijnenberg warns. If they collapse under populated areas, this could lead to the collapse of all the buildings remaining above them.

If the IDF’s plan to flood the tunnels is fully implemented, it will be the latest step in a long history of Israeli attacks on Palestinian water supplies. Even before the damage to water infrastructure caused by the latest bombing of Gaza, supplies for people in the territory and the West Bank were precarious, said Hadeel Ihmais, head of climate change at the Palestinian Authority for Environmental Quality.

In the West Bank, Palestinians do not have access to surface water and are forced to buy water from the Israelis. Israeli settlers and soldiers attacked water supplies in the West Bank approximately three times a month between January 2022 and mid-2023.

In Gaza, the underground aquifer is not replenishing enough to meet demand due to population growth and climate impacts including drought and rising temperatures. During the last war, desalination plants, water collection and wastewater treatment infrastructure were targeted, leading to the dumping of waste into the sea, The Guardian notes.

“Discharging wastewater into the sea makes desalination much more difficult. By targeting water supplies, Israel is trying to make Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians,” Ihmais said.

The UN Environment Program said it had seen reports that Israel had begun pumping water into Gaza tunnels. Responding to The Guardian, a spokesman gave a similar assessment of the potential impact.

“The coastal aquifer, an underground natural reservoir that stretches from the Carmel mountain range in the north to the Sinai Peninsula in the south, Gaza’s already fragile ecosystem must be protected so that there is no impact on agriculture, industry and the environment, and so that people can It is safe to use groundwater,” the spokesman said.

“Any method used by warring parties during a conflict must take every precaution to avoid harm to civilians, including restricting access to water and food resources.”