TEHRAN - In addition to massacre in the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged an environmental war on the coastal enclave that houses 2.3 million population.

Just by late November, the Israeli army had dropped 40,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7. The amount of bombs dropped on the tiny enclave is surprising. This amount is expected to rise more as Israel resumed its bombardment of the strip on Friday (December 1) after a week-long truce to exchange prisoners.

Analysts say the purpose of carpet bombing, which is an instance of environmental war crime, is to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable.

Euro-Med Monitor Human Rights Monitor said in early November that the weight of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in August 1945 was estimated at about 15,000 tons. Most of the bombs that Israel is using in Gaza are exceptionally big, weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.

"It's beyond anything that I've seen in my career," Marc Garlasco, a military advisor for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, told The New York Times.

He said that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs being used on such a small area, we may "have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War."

While the world, especially countries located in the Middle East and North Africa, are suffering from the saddening effects of global warming, Israel is adding salt to the wound by releasing huge amounts of pollutants through its carpet bombing of Gaza.

Additionally, the mad war on Gaza, which has so far left tens of thousands of housing units in ruins, has produced millions of tons of construction refuse in the small enclave.

Satellite images commissioned by the BBC reveal the extent of destruction across Gaza, showing that nearly 98,000 buildings may have suffered damage.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor have reprimanded Israel for using white phosphorus in Gaza.

When exposed to air, the chemical burns at extremely high temperatures — high enough to burn through metal and bone — and often ignites fires in areas where it is deployed, affecting the environment.

The West has been rightly critical of Russia for causing environmental damage by starting a war on Ukraine. However, they have been mum about Israel’s environmental war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The European Parliament on January 19, 2023, adopted a resolution on the establishment of “a tribunal on the crime of aggression against Ukraine (2022/3017(RSP)), which recognizes the link between war and long-term damage to the natural environment and climate, and supports the UN General Assembly's recommendation on the creation of an international register of damage 'to serve as a record for future reparations for ... widespread and severe damage to the natural environment and the climate'.  The resolution also underlining that war caused “ecocide” and constitutes a “war crime”.

However, why the West, including the European Parliament, is silent about the environmental damage in Gaza is once again demonstrates the West’s double standards. The environmental damage caused by Israel’s war on Gaza in just about 50 days is far much higher than that one caused by Russia in its war on Ukraine which started in in February 2022.

Summarily speaking, Israel has launched a warfare on environment and humanity as a whole in its mad war on Gaza.

Experts warn that the destruction inflicted on the Gaza Strip’s environment will last for years to come.

UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment David R. Boyd tells TRT World that “Air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, toxic contamination and large volumes of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by military conflict.” 

Boyd adds, “These environmental impacts exacerbate the toll of death and injury directly caused by acts of war, but the environmental death toll will continue for decades due to respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases and cancer caused by exposure to elevated levels of pollution.”

A prolonged period of heavy explosions — as is happening in Gaza — leaves massive amounts of cement particles suspended in the air. Chemicals and deadly gases left by ammunition linger in the environment for years to come, poisoning plant life and polluting water.

Erum Zahir, a professor in the University of Karachi’s chemistry department, also says, “In conflict-affected areas, the detonation of explosives can release significant amounts of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter.

Palestine is already described as a region suffering from heat, drought and water scarcity, and is geographically vulnerable because of the climate crisis. It also faces a severe shortage of water, the supply of which is controlled by Israel.

Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants and almost all the sewage pumping stations have shut down, according to Oxfam, which adds that untreated sewage is now being discharged into the Mediterranean Sea.

Globally, militaries have been known to produce around 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions from warfare contribute further to that figure, Boyd says.

Now that UN climate summit -COP 28 – is underway in Dubai it is the proper time to put extreme pressure to not only end its barbaric acts against the innocent civilians but also stop its environmental war crimes in the tiny enclave.

Jordan’s king said the war is making the threats from climate change even worse in the Gaza Strip.

 “The massive destruction of war makes the environmental threats of water scarcity and food insecurity even more severe. In Gaza our people are living with little clean water and the bare minimum of food supplies, as climate threats magnify the devastation of war,” King Abdullah II told the summiteers.

The West has been appeasing Israel for decades at the cost of peace and stability in the Middle East. If, based on their colonial and supremacist approaches, the lives of the ordinary people in Palestine are not important they must pressure Israel to stop its war on the environment.

UN Secretary General António Guterres rightly said the October 7 attack on southern Israel “did not happen in a vacuum”. In his speech on Friday to the climate summit in the UAE, Guterres must have also mentioned that the environmental effects of 40,000 tons of bombs dropped on the Gaza Strip will continue to afflict Gazans for decades to come.