War and Garbage in Gaza

It showed two young boys picking through waste and rubble. Sewage water was flowing in the roads all around them. The video was confirmed to be taken in Gaza City, a northern outpost that has endured months of bombing due to its  alleged  importance to Hamas.

Just months before, the same street was filled with joy and excitement as families crowded the newly-opened pastry shop to buy candy and freshly baked Kunafa, a staple Palestinian dessert. After October 7th, the neighborhood children no longer frequented the street to buy sweets; they looked for food to survive, with Oxfam  reporting  that people in the Gaza Strip consumed around 245 calories daily.

Though the state of food security and future reconstruction efforts have already received significant international attention, another critical component in those images is yet to be addressed.

"I survived the Israeli bombing, but I fear dying from the diseases this garbage leaves behind... We are dying slowly in Gaza, unnoticed,"

The Israeli counter-offensive launched in response to the October 7th Hamas attacks has by now passed its half-year point. Gaza, the main theater of operations, has evolved into a site of great material destruction and human suffering. Almost 35.000 deaths have been  reported  by the Gaza Ministry of Health, while the United Nations Population Fund  estimates  that more than 85% of the civilian population has been  displaced  by the fighting.

At the same time, the ongoing bombing campaign has inadvertently altered Gaza’s architectural profile with damage assessments  showing  between 35% to over  half  of all built-up areas reduced to rubble. Besides residential and commercial buildings, critical infrastructure including hospitals, sewage processing facilities, and water pipelines has also collapsed.

The solid waste management infrastructure has been hit particularly hard with a series of bombing campaigns and Israel’s  fuel blockade  having decimated the, already small and outdated, collection fleets. Local authorities also  claim  that the Israeli Defense Forces are preventing access to the official landfills forcing the municipalities and local people into improper waste disposal methods. 

​​According to  recent  UN figures,  there are over 2,000 tons of solid waste generated per day, compared with 600 tons prior to the war. Most of it ends up in Gaza's streets, parks, and fields..

Solid waste crises in warzones from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen have  demonstrated  the health and environmental risk of improper waste management. Open landfills lacking official oversight are a  breeding ground  for disease-carrying rodents, flies, and mosquitoes. As their numbers increase, so do the chances that the already vulnerable, malnourished, and conflict-ridden population is exposed to communicable diseases  like  gastrointestinal infections, asthma, skin irritation, and cholera. At the same time, as an ever-growing number of people, many of whom children, resort to waste scavenging and come to contact with  hazardous substances , instances of  respiratory problems  are likely to skyrocket.

Besides its deadly consequences for people, solid waste can render Gaza wholly uninhabitable. In unmonitored, make-shift landfills, leaking substances, called leachate, slowly seep into the soil. This chemical  soup , consisting of soluble organic matter, inorganic components, heavy metals, and xenobiotic organic compounds,  contaminates   agricultural lands  and the  aquifer  gradually destroying the regional ecosystem. Eventually, the  toxic substances  penetrate the food chain and also find their way back to humans.

Gaza is the newest breeding ground for such disasters. 

If the issue of solid waste, including medical waste, is not adequately addressed and resolved, it will exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It will severely impact public health, particularly with limited access to healthcare services. Moreover, it will contaminate agricultural lands and the aquifer as pollutants seep into the soil. We must take decisive steps to avert the long-term consequences

Past research on solid waste landfills in Syria was instrumental in helping identify solid waste dumps in satellite imagery. For this investigation, while medium resolution imagery from Sentinel-2 was used, most of the work was done using high-resolution optical imagery provided by Planet Labs’ SkySat satellites. Pictures from October were useful in understanding what the terrain looked like prior to the launch of the Israeli counter-offensive, while imagery from April establishes what the situation on the ground looks like now.

• Trash is a different spectrum of gray and black, the color of most frequently used trash bags. This gray-black scale is apparent in this image of the Jahr Al Deek field, one of the largest official waste landfills in Gaza.

But gray or black-colored masses on satellite imagery do not necessarily equal trash. A lot of the grayscale features are likely to be rubble, especially given the months of intense bombardment in Gaza. That is why the use of pre-conflict imagery is necessary. For instance, in the following image from Khan Younis, a quite significant grey area is visible and at first sight, one could assume that it is waste. Checking pre-conflict imagery, however, one can see that there used to be a building in the now grey zone, which means that what we see in April is rubble and not waste. 

Of course, context is also important. The gray-scale plot is found next to other buildings, so it is likely to also have been a building itself. Still, in the chaotic and ever-changing environment of wartime Gaza, empty land next to residential buildings is often converted into waste fields. 

• The shape of the waste dumps is a second telling characteristic. Waste fields have irregular shapes as can be seen in this image of a waste dump north of Nuseirat Camp along the Wadi river of Gaza.

Hence, if the patches of gray appear to frame a more ordered polygon or square, even without comparing it with pre-conflict footage, one might already be suspicious that this used to be a building. For instance, in this image from Northern Gaza, it is unclear what the gray square-looking patches are. Comparing it with October imagery we see that what stood there before used to be a beach-side hotel. The gray patch is rubble and not trash. Context is helpful again, as there are other built structures around. Still, a lot of waste disposal occurs close to the beach, so a makeshift dump could have also been here.

• Location and contextual elements are also helpful. Most dumps are relatively far from residential areas, as people do not want to live close to waste. Other possible locations are empty plots, river banks, or the outskirts of formal landfills. In urban environments where free land is not widely available, entire streets can be converted into landfills. This can be seen in the following image from the urban and more densely populated Northern Gaza, where a road is transformed into a makeshift dump site.

Using this method at least 225 waste sites across the Gaza Strip have been identified. This is a conservative estimate, given that a lot of the small dump sites, especially when they are found in urban areas, are not visible in satellite imagery. The solid waste is likely much more prolific and thus the expected consequences of the accumulation are much graver.