By Naa Yarley

Edited by Alex Bagdade, David Barsemian & Ghayas Osseiran

Introduction

In Gaza, war does not end when bombs stop falling. Long after the airstrikes subside, environmental collapse continues to exact a slow, often invisible toll. Water turns toxic, soil retains chemical residue, and the air carries carcinogens. Violence is sedimented into the material fabric of life. Written amid the ongoing war following the October 7, 2023 attacks, this paper turns to Operation Protective Edge (2014), launched in response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, as a critical antecedent to understand how ecological destruction functions as a central modality of settler-colonial governance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks: ‘how does Israel’s environmental governance function as a necropolitical project, targeting both human and ecological life for attritional elimination?’

To address this, the paper draws on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, defined as the sovereign power exercised through the power to dictate “who may live and who must die”. In the Palestinian context, necropolitics operates not only through spectacle but through the infrastructural, control and destruction of water networks, electricity supplies, sanitation systems, roads, border crossings and healthcare facilities.. This paper extends Mbembe’s framework by, situating necropolitics within environmental governance and the long-term degradation of ecosystems essential to Palestinian survival. Rob Nixon’s theory of ‘slow violence’ is used to further frame the temporally dispersed, generational harm embedded in settler practices.

Situated within political ecology, settler-colonial studies, and necropolitics, this paper contributes to emerging scholarship on ecocide in Palestine by extending necropolitical theory to ecological destruction in Gaza. Whereas Mbembe uses the term “ecocide” to describe a condition of human degradation, this paper uses it primarily to name the destruction of the more-than-human conditions of life—water, soil, air, farmland, biodiversity, built environments, and the territorial infrastructures that sustain them—through which human degradation is also produced. It argues that settler-colonial domination operates through a multi-scalar assault on ecology, understood not simply as “the environment” but as the interdependent biological, spatial, infrastructural, and geopolitical relations that make life possible. It further examines how this violence rebounds onto Israeli society through what Derrida terms “autoimmunity". Namely,  ecological harms that ultimately undermine the settler state’s own project of securitisation. or, ecological harm that undermines the settler state's own securitisation efforts.

The first section traces the ecocidal violence of Operation Protective Edge, left effectively unregulated by international humanitarian law and accountability mechanisms, drawing on soldier testimonies and humanitarian reports to show how “organised chaos” enabled the targeting of both human and more-than-human life. The second section focuses on Gaza’s water infrastructure, theorising Israeli control over water systems as a necropolitical (“make die”) modality that engineers ecological dependency and collapse. The third section explores the environmental aftermath, and outlines how environmental toxicity infiltrates the body through air, water, and soil. The final section examines the transboundary effects of environmental collapse, arguing that toxic spillover destabilises settler-colonial rule over Palestine by undermining its biopolitical logic of containment.

In tracing the Israeli state’s settler-colonial exercise of sovereignty over Palestinian land, life, and ecological systems in Gaza and the West Bank, the paper argues that the deliberate destabilisation of these ecologies also produces consequences that exceed its intended territorial and securitising objectives, exemplifying what Derrida terms “autoimmunity.”

Literature review

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower provides a foundational understanding of how modern states exercise control over life. Developed in his analysis of evolving power structures from the 18th century onwards, Foucault argues that sovereignty transitioned from a classical right “to take life or let live” to a modern form of power focused on managing, ordering, and fostering life through institutions, practices and knowledge. In this framework, states shifted from demonstrating power primarily through deduction - extracting resources, labour or blood - to regulating populations by promoting health, productivity, and social order. While biopower is concerned with the administration and optimisation of life, Foucault argues that this project is inseparable from a sovereign right to expose certain populations to violence and death. On Mbembe’s reading, modern regimes secure the life of privileged groups precisely by relegating racialised and marginalised communities to conditions in which they may be killed, abandoned, or allowed to die; their disposability is not incidental to biopolitics, but helps sustain the policies and protections through which other lives are made to live.

In pre-modern societies, threats to political authority were largely understood as direct challenges to the sovereign, with violence (such as executions or defensive wars) primarily serving to protect the ruler and their position of power. Acts of killing were thus centred on preserving the sovereign’s dominion over subjects (and vice versa). However, Foucault observes, the logic of state violence transformed with the emergence of modern power structures. In modernity, “wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone” (though this “everyone” has never extended equally to racialised and marginalised populations). Entire populations become mobilised, and violence is justified out of a necessity to protect and preserve life. Entire populations are mobilised, and violence is justified as necessary to protect and preserve the life of the privileged social body. Massacres and large-scale death, Foucault argues, are thereby reframed as vital acts through which dominant societies are made to live by exposing racialised and non-privileged populations to death.

In his 2019 book Necropolitics, the historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe advanced a critical intervention into Foucault’s concept of biopower by exposing its limitations in addressing the violent realities of colonialism, slavery, and modern statehood. Mbembe challenged the assumption that sovereign power operated through consensual frameworks such as the social contract, arguing instead for a racial contract wherein modern sovereignty was fundamentally rooted in the capacity to dictate death of marginalised populations. While biopower emphasised the regulation and fostering of life (allowing some to die as a byproduct), Mbembe posited that in many contexts, especially under colonial and capitalist systems,  power, was explicitly organised around the management and production of death. Importantly for this work, he specifies that, apartheid is “a fantasy of extermination” As he asserted, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is allowed to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. According to Mbembe, sovereignty is defined by the deliberate exposure of targeted populations to death, abandonment, or conditions of existence that blur the boundary between life and death.

Furthering his critique, Mbembe found that biopower was insufficient for understanding these contemporary forms of subjugation, writing, “the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death”. To illustrate this, he identified systems such as slavery, apartheid, colonial occupation, and modern warfare as foundational examples where sovereignty was enacted through the normalisation of violence, dispossession, and the systemic reduction of human beings to expendable bodies. Mbembe linked these necropolitical practices to the foundation of modern democracies, arguing that Western political orders were built upon a dual structure: outwardly promoting ideals of liberty and governance (the “solar body”), while simultaneously relying on the violent mechanisms of empire, slavery and repression (the “nocturnal body”). He wrote, “the history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces, and even two bodies - the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state - and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony”. This duality highlights how modern states obscure their violent foundations, presenting themselves as adherents of a rules-based order while perpetuating structures of dominion and death, often beyond their own borders.

Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics also addresses the limitations of Foucault’s biopower by incorporating and expanding upon Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the homo sacer, as introduced in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). The homo sacer refers to a figure in Roman law who could be killed without legal repercussion yet was deemed unworthy of ritual sacrifice, an individual excluded from political community and reduced to what Agamben terms “bare life”: existence stripped of rights, protection, and political value. According to Agamben, the homo sacer exemplified the sovereign’s capacity to suspend legal norms and create a class of people who exist outside of the law, exposed to arbitrary violence without consequence. Mbembe builds on this notion, arguing that bare life is no longer an exception but a pervasive condition in modernity, particularly within colonial, racialised, and militarised contexts. He asserts that such individuals inhibit death-in-life, where their existence is marked by continuous exposure to violence and disposability. To illustrate this, Mbembe identifies populations subjected to concentration camps, systemic state violence, and notably, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. These groups inhabit what Mbembe defines as “death worlds” - spaces where life is governed through abandonment, degradation, and the ever-present risk of death

While Foucault’s biopower emphasises the regulation of life through institutional mechanisms such as schools, hospitals, and prisons (spaces designed to discipline and optimise populations), necropolitics shifts focus to those spaces where the state exercises power through the active production of death and decay. In these death-worlds, inhabitants endure conditions akin to what Mbembe terms “living death”, wherein law becomes a mode of violence, not geared at protecting these populations, but subjugating them. Crucially, they remain perpetually vulnerable to direct or structural violence, where death can be inflicted arbitrarily and with impunity. Within this framework, Palestinians in the OPT represent a contemporary manifestation of the homo sacer - a population systematically excluded from sovereignty’s protections, subjected to environmental deprivation, spatial confinement, and state-sanctioned violence. Cnucially, this article draws on Mbembe’s engagement with Fanon, and uses the term ‘spatial’ to refer to the spatialisation of settler occupation.   Mbembe’s engagement with Agamben thus reinforces his critique of modern sovereignty, highlighting how necropolitical governance creates entire populations whose existence is managed through exposure to death.

Though Foucault’s theory of biopower acknowledges the role of race in determining which segments of a population are afforded protection and whose lives are rendered expendable, Mbembe places the racialised dimension at the very centre of his theory of necropolitics. According to Mbembe, contemporary regimes of sovereignty cannot be understood apart from the colonial histories and racial hierarchies that continue to shape global political life. Necropolitics, in his formulation, is the power to expose particular populations (often racialised others) to conditions of death and erasure, frequently through spatial and juridical exclusion . This marks a departure from biopolitical power, which Foucault theorised as the management of life, towards a politics centred on the administration of death and the capacity to render life unlivable.

With an understanding of necropolitics, it is essential to further unpack its settler-colonial dimension. Patrick Wolfe’s seminal work, Settler Colonialism states that “invasion is a structure not an event”. Ron Smith builds on Wolfe, conceptualising occupation not as a singular historical event but as an evolving, continuous process. In his analysis of Israeli governance over the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Smith traces the shifting dynamics of the occupation across different periods, noting how it has become progressively embedded within the state’s political and military apparatus. He argues that Israeli policies (particularly those regulating Palestinian movement and access to Israeli settlements) fluctuate in severity in response to changing domestic priorities. These shifts, he suggests, reflect broader socio-political calculations, including Israel’s fluctuating demand for Palestinian labour and its strategic interests in controlling vital resources such as land and water. Through his analysis of the evolving nature of Israel’s occupation, Smith notes that, “While the occupation changes along dimensions of time based on the priorities of the occupier, it also varies from place to place, creating an array of microgeographies based on strategic concerns”. Smith’s reading of Israeli occupation is relevant for this paper in three key ways: it frames settler colonialism as the central analytic, identifies land and water as core to the settler project, and highlights the role of “microgeographies”—the small-scale, everyday spatial arrangements through which power is experienced and enforced—in revealing how occupation is enacted on the ground. Building on this, the paper explores ecologies across different sites to examine how necropolitical strategies shape both humans and nature under occupation.

In positioning settler colonialism as a key analytic, it is worth clarifying the concept. Wolfe’s work in its application to Palestine has spurred a growing body of literature that has demonstrated both its utility and its limitations. Scholars such as Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi link Israeli settler-colonisation to broader European currents of nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism. Wolfe’s thesis has been widely recognised as a powerful tool for exposing structural injustice, while also critiqued for certain conceptual limitations because its argument raises tensions around the possibility of decolonisation, given that the settler state can “never… be fully extinguished until the native is”. This is a paradox that risks foreclosing political horizons.Wolfe was himself attuned to settler colonialism’s structural incompleteness, arguing that its eliminationist project can never be fully realised because Indigenous peoples, political claims, and relations to land persist despite ongoing attempts at dispossession and erasure. As he writes, “The quest to replace Native society only maintains the refractory imprint of the Native counterclaim.” In the context of Israel, Wolfe highlights the contradiction of a settler regime that seeks the elimination of Palestinians while remaining dependent on their continued presence as a source of labour, as a demographic and territorial threat through which Israeli sovereignty is defined, and as the population over which the occupation’s coercive apparatus is exercised. This tension is encapsulated in his claim that Israel “cannot live with Palestinians and it cannot live without them.” Complete elimination would constitute failure because it would undermine the settler state’s capacity to define and consolidate Israeli sovereignty through the ongoing management, displacement, and containment of a Palestinian population; it would expose the contradiction that settler colonial power requires the very Indigenous presence it seeks to erase.

Comparative scholarship has reinforced the relevance of this framework for understanding the Israeli occupation. Eyal Weizman, for example, begins his analysis of “frontier geography” by drawing parallels with other settler colonies before demonstrating how Israel’s frontier space constitutes a flexible, militarised geography shaped by the perpetual reproduction of violence.

The notion of a frontier geography introduces a conceptual space of contradictory relations between land, sovereignty, and population that, as Omar Jabary Salamanca and colleagues argue, generate a structural “instability” within Israeli settler-colonial rule. In response to this instability, the Israeli state deploys various strategies, including aerial and naval bombardments, massacres, invasions, home demolitions, land confiscation, identity revocation, racist dual legal systems (one for settlers and one for Palestinians), loyalty oaths, the separation wall, the destruction of Gaza, and the instrumentalisation of coerced Palestinian collaboration. Within this context, Rana Barakat observes that Israel is compelled to activate a particularly broad spectrum of settler colonial tactics, which operate simultaneously and often contradictorily in an effort to maintain control.

This paper seeks to identify and theorise specific settler colonial modalities that are biopolitically and necropolitically directed toward ecology within the context of Israeli occupation. These modalities unfold across its permanent frontier and within its microgeographies, constituting distinct components of the broader array of practices sustaining the occupation’s violence. As Jad Isaac and Jane Hilal have emphasised, the “Palestinian environment has been the first casualty” of Israel’s occupation.” This isn’t to imply that one form of suffering is more significant than another, but to highlight the foundational interdependence between human life and the environmental systems that sustain it. The destruction of the environment inevitably reverberates through all forms of life (human and otherwise) because ecologies are simultaneously biological and territorial (in the geographical sense). No life can endure without access to a viable material habitat. In this sense, it responds to Alatout’s call for a renewed focus on both territorial and biological elements of power, or the entwined processes through which settler-colonial regimes exercise control by reshaping space and regulating life itself, often to the point of its eradication.

Within this context, the paper argues that the destruction of Palestinian ecologies is not an incidental consequence of occupation, but a means of advancing land seizure and territorial expansion; it is through this necropolitical remaking of the environment that settler-colonial territorial ambitions are pursued. This is captured in Wolfe’s assertion that “land is life… or, at least, is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be - indeed, often are - contests for life.” The removal of Indigenous populations from their land is frequently enacted through ecocidal strategies, revealing how environmental degradation serves as both a tactic and consequence of settler colonialism. Kyle Powys Whyte highlights what is at stake in such processes. Settlers inscribe their origin stories, religious and cultural systems, and political economies into the land itself (into the waters, air, and soil), effectively overwriting Indigenous ecologies. Settler colonialism, Whyte argues, enacts environmental injustice that disrupts the sociocultural and ecological relationships essential for Indigenous life-worlds. Glen Coulthard adds that anticolonial struggle is not only about reclaiming land in its material sense, but about restoring systems of reciprocal, ethical relations with the natural world. Together, Whyte and Coulthard demonstrate the key concerns of this paper: the intrinsic link between decolonisation and the necropolitical entanglement of settler-colonialism, ecocide, and the erasure of ethical obligations to humans and nature.

Recently, more scholarship has explored the links between settler-colonialism and environmental destruction in the context of occupied Palestine. Damien Short and Haifa Rashed, for example, examine the ecocidal outcomes of Israeli settler acts, while Seif Da’Na analyses how Israel’s water policies have devastated Palestine’s environment. Da’Na emphasises that the ecological degradation is not incidental but rooted in the structural nature of the Israeli settler project, including its agricultural, industrial, and lifestyle imperatives, which entangle national and ecological objectives. Similarly, D.A. Jaber, in Settler Colonialism and Ecocide, argues that Israel’s drive to eliminate Palestinian indigeneity necessarily produces environmental destruction. He claims that settler space should be understood as intentionally ecocidal because, “it implicates not only the indigenous population but also the local and regional ecologies. Jaber’s case study of Al-Khader illustrates how land expropriation, settler violence, militarised devastation, and discriminatory policy converge to produce ecocide. This demonstrates the extent to which settler colonial domination in Palestine operates simultaneously through the targeting of human and environmental life.

In his historical analysis of the term’s roots, David Zierler identifies 1970 as the moment when “ecocide” was first articulated by botanist Arthur W. Galston and a cohort of scientists. They coined the term to denounce the severe environmental harm and human health impacts resulting from the US military’s use of herbicidal agents during the Vietnam War. Franz Broswimmer, in his examination of ecocide within the context of contemporary warfare, outlines a range of practices associated with ecocidal violence, including the use of defoliants, explosives that degrade soil quality, military bulldozing of forests and agricultural land, and the forced displacement of human or animal populations for strategic purposes. In this paper, these very techniques of defoliation, land degradation, forced displacement, and ecological transformation have all been employed, to varying degrees, by the Israeli state within the occupied Palestinian territories.

While these ecocidal methods function as distinct categories, they also reveal interlocking site-specific sites of necropower that collectively intensify necropolitical outcomes, manifesting, in effect, as war through alternative tactics. For example, Israel’s seizure of Palestinian water resources amplifies its destruction of Palestinian plant life, such as the uprooting of olive groves. In deploying these differentiated strategies of necropower, this paper aims to disaggregate the otherwise monolithic category of biopolitics; challenge its anthropocentric assumptions, which often obscure the targeting of nature in militarised contexts; and recast necropolitics through an ecological lens by foregrounding its ecocidal dimensions.

Section One: Operation Protective Edge and the Necropolitics of Wanton Destruction

Before discussing the various ecological, necropolitical modes of destruction Israel has wrought upon the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it is first important to establish how the IDF cultivated the environment of wanton destruction that enabled it. During Operation Protective Edge, multiple IDF soldiers testified that the Israeli military’s modus operandi was effectively one of unrestrained violence in line with the logic of the Dahiyah doctrine, which necessitates “massive, disproportionate force”.

First, it is important to establish that the term ‘wanton’ here, is used in the same way  in the same manner as outlined by International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in the Trial Chamber judgment of Kordic and Cerkez, (February 26, 2001) held that “[T]he elements for the crime of wanton destruction not justified by military necessity charged under Article 3(b) of the Statute are satisfied where: (i) the destruction of property occurs on a large scale; (ii) the destruction is not justified by military necessity; and (iii) the perpetrator acted with the intent to destroy the property in question or in reckless disregard of the likelihood of its destruction.

One soldier noted that the standing order was to “shoot to kill anything that moves”, while the broader objective was to “leave the area razed”. This scorched-earth approach not only targeted human populations but also resulted in the large-scale destruction of nature caught in the crossfire. The UN report on Operation Protective Edge confirmed, based on satellite imagery and video analysis provided by UNITAR-UNOSAT, that vast swathes of Gaza were effectively obliterated, with the IDF killing 2,251 Palestinians (551 of whom were children), destroying over 18,000 housing units, and  damaging 73 medical facilities. The commission's findings, corroborated by photographic evidence and testimonies from IDF soldiers affiliated with anti-war Israeli activist group Breaking the Silence, suggest that the scale of environmental devastation “may have been adopted as tactics of war”. These actions amount to what international humanitarian law defines as ‘wanton destruction’ or the excessive or unjustified use of force, often carried out in violation of the rules of engagement. However, multiple testimonies suggest that such rules were absent altogether. One soldier stationed in northern Gaza stated that, “there were no rules of engagement… just blasting things away”. Authorisation procedures, which were meant to regulate military engagement, were regularly ignored: “There was no such thing as requesting authorisation. Just fire”. An IDF captain confirmed this procedural void, stating that “Rules of engagement are part of the combat procedure… and there were none”. Finally, one soldier discussed the consequences of the operation on the environment, describing how soldiers would “shoot at bushes, trees, at all sorts of houses you suddenly run into, at more trees”.

The lack of rules of engagement in Operation Protective Edge enabled violence that was systematic. While the overarching mission to raze everything was strategic and programmatic, the question of who or what was killed was often determined by the logic of the Dahiya doctrine. chance. Manuel DeLanda encapsulates this paradox in his concept of ‘obligatory contingency’, which he defines as a situation in which connections “are not logically necessary but contingently obligatory”. In this context, the Israeli military’s unregulated practices meant the mere presence of any entity (whether human or ecological) within a soldier’s field of vision could constitute a sufficient condition for lethal action. For example, there would not have been an operational necessity to shoot a horse encountered in the field. Yet, in the absence of informal directives, the encounter itself triggered a contingent obligation to kill.

The IDF’s actions in areas such as Shuja'iya, Rafah, and Khuza’a during Operation Protective Edge illustrate how settler-colonial, militarised, and religio-nationalist imperatives intersect with random, nonlinear variables to produce landscapes of destruction. This violence should not be dismissed as mere chaos; rather, it reveals a deeper operational pattern consistent with the logic of ‘chaos theory’. What appears to be arbitrary acts of bombing, bulldozing, and shooting are, in fact, expressions of “organised chaos” whereby seemingly spontaneous practices replicate discernible patterns at multiple scales. These fractal repetitions are evident in the recurrent destruction of living beings and material environments: the destruction of an orchard, the bulldozing of a tree, the shooting of a man, a sheep, a dog. Though governed by randomness at the level of the individual encounter, these acts are inscribed with structural coherence. They constitute self-similar units of militarised violence that scale outward, forming an overarching pattern of ecocidal and necropolitical practice.

Palestinian farmer, Ali Alommor’s testimony gives voice to the structural violence that defines ecologies in warzones. Having escaped death, leaving behind dead camels, donkeys, and other animals he reounts, “The tank hit the trees, the stones, and even the animals”. Animals that initially survived missile strikes or bulldozers later died of starvation, as the family had fled and access to food and water was severed. Alommor explained how “Israeli troops shoot at anything that moves, even when they can see it’s only a camel, donkey, or chicken kept outdoors in summer”. An IDF soldier discussed “the killing of animals,” recalling a company sergeant major who opened fire from an APC, indiscriminately spraying bullets at horses, sheep, and donkeys. Such accounts indicate a systematic disregard for nonhuman life, where more-than-human beings become collateral or even intentional casualties of unregulated military conduct.

The affective dimensions of this violence are deeply etched in the memories of survivors. On returning home, Alommor discovered all 30 of his sheep dead, some riddled with bullet holes, one with its head severed, others swarmed by flies and worms. Some animals bore no visible wounds, likely having died from trauma, hunger, thirst, or environmental collapse. Their deaths were situated within a landscape of ruin: polluted water, razed fields, and crumbling infrastructure. As Alommor reflects, “I wish I knew they hadn’t suffered”, a wish belied by the evidence of violent and drawn-out death.

The prohibition against ‘wanton destruction’ during armed conflict is enshrined in both the 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Certain operations conducted by the IDF could potentially be classified as war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In particular, Articles 8(2)(a)(iv) and 8(2)(b)(ii) forbid the “extensive destruction or appropriation of property” when such acts lack military necessity and are executed unlawfully and deliberately, and the deliberate targeting of “civilian objects”, defined as entities not serving military purposes. While these provisions extend certain protections to animals, vegetation, and other more-than-human entities, such protections are contingent on their classification as civilian property rather than on any recognition of intrinsic ecological value. Israel, however, is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not accept the jurisdiction of the ICC. Following the Palestinian Authority’s accession to the Rome Statute and its call for an investigation into alleged war crimes during Operation Protective Edge, Israel denounced the Court, vowing to undermine its legitimacy and accusing it of hypocrisy and of emboldening terrorism.

The following section will examine how the permissive environment of wanton destruction cultivated during Operation Protective Edge enabled the systematic, necropolitical targeting of Palestinian nature.

Section Two: Water, Necropolitics, and Settler-Colonial Rule

Across the extensive documentation of Gaza’s devastation during Operation Protective Edge, significant attention has been paid to Israel’s systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, including water systems, electricity grids, sewage facilities, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and farmland. Stephen Graham characterises this strategy as “urbicide”, which he defines as the deliberate destruction of the urban fabric as a form of spatial and social warfare. So, where urbicide names the deliberate destruction of the urban fabric, including the homes, services, and built infrastructures that sustain collective urban life, ecocide extends this analysis to the destruction of wider ecological conditions of life, including water, soil, air, farmland, biodiversity, and more-than-human life. In Gaza, the two forms of destruction are inseparable. Crucially, urbicide differs  In Shell-Shocked: On the Ground under Israel’s Gaza Assault, journalist Mohammed Omer offers a granular, day-by-day account of life under bombardment. The phrase “on the ground” in his title foregrounds the testimonial nature of his perspective and also highlights the materiality of place, bearing witness not only through narrative but also from the traumatised terrain of Gaza itself.

In his introduction, Omer argues that the destruction of infrastructure cannot be explained solely through religious or historical claims to the land. Rather, he frames the occupation as a struggle over resource control, writing,  “This occupation is not about religion, biblical history or any other excuse used to justify it. It is about water: headwaters, rivers and aquifers. It is about who controls and prospers from natural resources ranging from arable land to natural gas reservoirs under the West Bank and beneath Gaza’s coastal waters.” Omer situated this within what has been described as “Israel’s water warfare”, a deliberate strategy aimed at rendering Palestinian life unlivable by systematically denying access to essential ecological resources. As he writes, “Amongst the casualties of Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip has been the coastal enclave’s water infrastructure, which has not been spared deliberate targeting by Israeli missiles.” Omer argues that these attacks are part of a sustained campaign designed to render life intolerable. Depriving Palestinians access to water is weaponised as a form of warfare. The broader consequences of this include long-term ecological degradation, severe and ongoing threats to public health, and the effective exclusion of a substantial civilian population from access to clean drinking water.

Within the framework of Israel’s necropolitical “water warfare,” the strategic control and distribution of water resources emerge as a central instrument for structuring differential conditions of life. Water governance in this context serves to secure the flourishing of Israeli settler life while simultaneously relegating Palestinians to conditions of near-bare survival. The ecocidal ramifications of this system extend beyond human deprivation, affecting vegetal and animal life through interlinked environmental degradation. One illustrative example is the illegal settlement of Ariel, whose wastewater runoff contaminates lands under the jurisdiction of the Salfit Council.

This pollution has not only destroyed seasonal Palestinian crops but has also led to the disappearance of native fauna, including deer, rabbits, and foxes. The cascading ecological impacts of settler water governance have been documented in multiple reports, which reveal how untreated sewage from illegal Israeli settlements (spanning industrial, agricultural, and residential sources) frequently spills onto Palestinian territory. This contamination compromises public health, disrupts agricultural livelihoods, and forces many farmers to abandon crop production and livestock grazing due to the unknown toxic compounds present in the wastewater. One report detailing the impact of the settlement’s water pollution on Palestinian life claimed:

“This poisoning and waste dumping takes place alongside numerous other abusive acts against the farmers at the hands of Israeli settlers and military, including their homes and livestock shelters being repeatedly torched, livestock intentionally run over, fodder crops torched, waste thrown in their rainwater collection tanks, prevention of access to water for themselves and livestock, and other abuses.”

In his case study of Al-Khader, D.A. Jaber detailed how the discharge of settler sewage on Palestinian farmlands has resulted in acidic soil conditions that burn crops, poison fruit yields, and pose long-term threats of toxicity to both the land and those who depend on it. These entangled harms demonstrate the necropolitical logic at work. Through water control, wastewater contamination, and the destruction of wells and sanitation systems, environmental harm is converted into slow violence, exposing Palestinian communities to pathogenic conditions, toxic water and food sources, skin infections, and longer-term threats to health and livelihoods.

Israel’s necropolitical water governance extends beyond the appropriation of Palestinian rivers and aquifers to include the deliberate targeting and destruction of critical water infrastructure, including wells and sewage systems. During Operation Protective Edge, the IDF reportedly damaged approximately 778 underground wells, a devastating blow to Gaza’s already fragile water system. The harm inflicted by such attacks is compounded by the structural control Israel exerts over the reconstruction and development of Palestinian water projects, particularly in the West Bank. All Palestinian water and sanitation initiatives must receive approval from the Joint Water Committee (JWC), where Israel exercises de facto veto power. According to available data, only 56 percent of Palestinian water proposals submitted to the JWC have been approved, compared to nearly 100 percent approval for Israeli proposals. Of those approved Palestinian projects, just one-third have been implemented. Beyond the JWC, Palestinian projects also require separate permits from the Israeli Civil Administration, which are extremely difficult to obtain. Denied formal routes to securing essential infrastructure, Palestinians are often forced to build without permits, actions that then provide Israel with justification to demolish the very projects Palestinians depend on for basic survival. In this way, Israel’s necropolitical water governance functions along two intersecting axes: the literal deprivation of water resources, contributing to the slow, enforced desiccation of Palestinian life, and the concurrent creation of pathogenic ecologies, conditions of pollution and infrastructural collapse that endanger public health and undermine ecological stability. As Erin McKenna explains, these practices are underpinned by a discriminatory legal regime that facilitates settler expansion while violating international principles such as the 1962 UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources. Israel maintains control over West Bank water resources, diverting them to meet its own needs while systematically denying Palestinians permission to drill new wells or develop irrigation systems. This policy not only entrenches inequality but enforces dependence, producing a West Bank not formally annexed, yet effectively absorbed into the Israeli water grid by the coercive logic of infrastructural necessity.

As Palestinian farmers are increasingly unable to irrigate their land due to the restricted and unreliable supply of water, Israel often designates these uncultivated areas as “dry” or “barren.” This bureaucratic classification then becomes a legal mechanism for expropriation: once deemed unproductive, the land may be claimed as state property or sold, rendering it unusable and economically worthless to its original Palestinian stewards. In this way, water governance actively facilitates the broader settler-colonial project of territorial expansion by engineering the conditions under which Palestinian dispossession appears administratively justified. Scholars Gasteyer, Isaac, Hilal, and Walsh have demonstrated the historical linkages of land and water seizure in the occupied territories, arguing that “land grabbing has been linked to water grabbing” and both have been instrumental in advancing Israel’s colonial objectives. Muna Dajani’s analysis of Israel’s “systemic water war,” further elaborates on how this strategic deprivation erodes the foundational relationship between Palestinians and their land. “By depriving farmers of water,” she writes, “they drive them off their land.”

The consequences of this strategy are far-reaching. Not only are Palestinians forced to abandon agricultural activity, but municipal authorities (such as those in Gaza) are compelled to purchase approximately five million additional cubic meters of water annually from Israel, deepening economic dependency. This manufactured scarcity has created an analogue to the restricted caloric regime, whereby Palestinians are allocated water in quantities barely sufficient for survival. The disparity is stark. Palestinians in the West Bank consume an average of just 79 liters of water per person per day, falling below the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum of 100 liters. In contrast, Israeli consumption averages around 287 liters per person per day, more than four times the Palestinian average. This structural inequality in access to water demonstrates the necropolitical dimensions of Israeli aquapolitics, in which infrastructural control enforces not only dispossession but also a slow, systematic erosion of life’s material conditions.

The measurable disparity and unequal distribution of water reveal the mutually constitutive “solar” and “nocturnal” bodies of settler-colonial rule, in which the secure and well-provisioned life of Israeli settlers is sustained through the managed deprivation and exposure to death of Palestinians. On one side, a Palestinian water politics of enforced deprivation and bare life; on the other, an Israeli water politics of excess and flourishing. This dual structure lays bare the calculated inequality that governs access to vital ecological resources. The consequences of this regime are starkly evident in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, during which the IDF’s destruction of Gaza’s sewage infrastructure led to widespread contamination of the water supply. The resulting public health crisis triggered outbreaks of various illnesses, including gastrointestinal infections, scabies, and lice. Abu Rida, a resident of Khan Younis who lost both his son and brother to Israeli airstrikes, captures the epidemiological dimension of Israeli water governance: “We escaped almost certain death from Israeli gunfire, but now it seems instead of sending missiles to kill us, Israel wants to kill us with disease.” His testimony shows how necropolitical control over water infrastructure operates not only as a tool of immediate destruction but also as a slow, attritional mechanism of harm. This deliberate exposure of the population to preventable disease (what might be termed epidemiological warfare) is emblematic of a broader necropolitical logic underpinning the settler state’s governance of Palestinian life. As explored in more depth below, the weaponisation of public health crises serves not simply as a byproduct of infrastructural collapse but as a targeted strategy of subjugation, displacement, and elimination, an extension of settler colonial power into the biological and ecological domains of existence.

The necropolitical dimensions of Israel’s water governance are deeply entangled with its toxic environmental impacts. One of the most acute examples is the destruction of Gaza’s sewage treatment infrastructure, which has resulted in millions of litres of untreated waste spilling into the Mediterranean Sea. This ecological collapse has produced toxic marine conditions, including widespread algal blooms that contaminate the local fish population—an essential food source for many Gazans. It notes that the environmental fallout from Operation Protective Edge led to an increase in polluted seawater that has caused a noticeable rise in dermatological conditions, with more residents suffering from skin rashes and infections after swimming in the sea compared to before the war. Within this necropolitical framework, Palestinian land and seascapes are rendered pollutable and transformable into ecological sacrifice zones. The territories are not merely neglected but actively reconfigured as sites for waste disposal. Solid waste from Israeli settlements and military outposts is routinely dumped without regulation onto Palestinian fields, roadsides, and agricultural land. Additionally, Israeli industries have relocated operations to the West Bank to exploit cheaper labour, lax environmental oversight, and the ability to dispose of hazardous byproducts, including aluminium, textile dyes, tanning chemicals, batteries, and plastics, into Palestinian ecosystems. These practices do not represent isolated environmental infractions but are part of a wider settler-colonial logic that instrumentalises land and ecology in the service of domination and disposability.

Eleven Israeli chemical factories have been established in the “seam zone” on confiscated Palestinian land (areas where industrial activity is effectively shielded from legal accountability). These factories operate under dubious jurisdictional frameworks controlled by the Israeli military, allowing them to pollute with impunity. Even Israel’s own State Comptroller has acknowledged the lawlessness of such conditions, noting they “place the well-being, health, and lives of the workers in the industrial zones in real danger.” A 2014 environmental report on unregulated toxic waste disposal by Israeli industries in the West Bank documents the dumping of solid waste, transported across the Green Line, containing dangerously high levels of lead. In one Palestinian village, authorities investigated the unexplained deaths of 25 cows, suspected to have perished due to elevated ammonium levels in the water linked to sewage discharges from nearby settlements. These environmental practices are emblematic of what Traci Voyles terms settler colonial wastelanding, or the racialised and spatial process through which land and the populations inhabiting it are rendered pollutable, disposable, and ecologically degraded. Within this framework, Palestinian lands are not only occupied but systematically transformed into environmental sacrifice zones.

Taken together, the evidence presented in this section suggests that water operates as a necropolitical technology of rule in both Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, military damage to wells, sewage systems, and water networks exposes communities to contaminated supplies and the epidemiological consequences of infrastructural collapse. In the West Bank, the restriction of drilling rights, the delayed approval of Palestinian water projects, and the diversion of water towards settlements constrain the capacity of Palestinian communities to reproduce everyday life through cultivation, sanitation, and public health. These practices do not merely distribute water unequally. They make access to a life-sustaining resource dependent on an occupying power that also controls, restricts, or destroys the infrastructure through which that resource can be secured.

Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics clarifies what is at stake in this arrangement. The issue is not that water deprivation produces immediate death in every instance, but that it establishes durable conditions in which illness, ecological degradation, displacement, and premature death become normalised features of Palestinian life. In this sense, the water regime contributes to the production of what Mbembe terms a death-world, where communities are compelled to endure life under conditions that steadily diminish its viability. This necropolitical exposure is inseparable from the biopolitical provision of water, sanitation, and agricultural security to Israeli settlements. The distinction between these conditions reflects the relationship Mbembe describes between the solar and nocturnal bodies of power. The visible provision of security and flourishing for settlers is sustained through a less visible system that renders Palestinian land, bodies, and ecologies vulnerable to contamination, scarcity, and slow attrition. Water control therefore functions not only as an instrument of resource management, but as a material means through which settler-colonial sovereignty differentiates between lives that are secured and lives made increasingly difficult to sustain.

The following chapter turns to the wastelanding of Gaza’s ecologies in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, with a specific focus on the military campaign’s ecocidal impacts on soil, air, and water systems.

Section Three: The aftermath of Operation Protective Edge

In the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, understanding the necropolitical and ecocidal dimensions of state violence in Gaza requires a multiperspectival approach, one that accounts for the combined environmental, military, and public health consequences of the assault. What follows draws on Ahamad Saleh Safi’s participatory environmental impact assessment of the 2014 Gaza War. The report condenses insights from both local informants and professionals in environmental science and public health, offering a composite view of the war’s ecological and epidemiological impacts on both human and more-than-human life. It identifies specific localities affected by environmental degradation and, through the integration of community testimony with expert medical analysis, traces patterns of disease and ecological disruption back to the pollutants generated during the military campaign. This collaborative methodology provides a crucial framework for assessing the long-term consequences of environmental warfare within necropolitical regimes.

The report disaggregates the geography of the Gaza Strip into various microgeographies, mapped according to the neighbourhoods most severely impacted by the military campaign, such as in Rafah. Within this territorial fragmentation lies nested microecologies that unfold in fractal complexity, including housing and agricultural fields, beaches, human bodies, vegetation, and the microbial life of soil and water. This multiperspectival vision enables a more nuanced understanding of how violence is distributed across space and scale. In this context, a necropolitics of nature emerges, demonstrating how state violence directed at a racialised and colonised population (in this case, Palestinians) also extends to the ecologies that sustain them. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of biopolitics as a mode of power concerned with regulating “multiplicities” and managing the life of a “global mass,” the report reveals how this logic is applied not only to human populations but to entire ecosystems entangled in the necropolitical machinery of occupation and war.

In their reading of Israel’s strategy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza through recurrent military operations, Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir contend that Israel is engaged in a prolonged, asymmetrical conflict with hostile non-state actors qualitatively distinct from conventional inter-state warfare. They argue that the primary aim of these military interventions is not to achieve unattainable political objectives, but to systematically degrade the adversary’s capacity to inflict harm. This could be interpreted as the Israeli state’s deployment of various necropolitical methods targeting nature, as part of this broader logic of debilitation, which aligns with Jasbir Puar’s conception of debility as a deliberate outcome of necropolitical governance.

Within the postwar ecologies of Gaza, these strategies converge to form an assemblage of slow violence: a lingering, attritional form of harm that incrementally erodes the material, ecological, and corporeal conditions of Palestinian life. When viewed within a comparative settler colonial frame, Israel’s use of attritional environmental violence mirrors broader patterns deployed by other colonial regimes, strategies that weaken Indigenous populations not through decisive confrontation, but through extended, systemic erosion of life-supporting ecologies.

This section will extend the framework of Israel’s attritional warfare beyond the temporal limits of formal military engagement to examine the postbellum ecologies of Gaza. In these war-scarred landscapes, a distinct form of attritional conflict persists long after the end of direct hostilities. As Nixon discusses, this is a war of slow violence (a form of harm that operates according to the principle of cumulative erosion over time). Within the context of Palestine, such attritional warfare is expansive, distributed differently across Gaza’s fragmented geographies, and temporally diffuse, with effects that unfold across delayed timelines and transgenerational bodies. By viewing the living body, whether human or ecological, as a microecological space embedded within intersecting biopolitical systems of attrition, we can better understand how physiological processes like ingestion (of contaminated food and water), inhalation (of polluted air), and percutaneous absorption (of heavy metals like lead) become affected by both pathogenic and necropolitical power. This constitutes a form of power that “slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it, and weakens it.” When life is exposed to toxic saturation and infrastructural decay, “killing” no longer requires direct violence; it occurs instead through the systematic exposure of populations to death over time. In this sense, Gaza’s post-conflict ecologies of aftermath exemplify the necropolitical logic of settler-colonial violence, operating not only through spectacular destruction but through the prolonged, embodied consequences of environmental collapse.

At this juncture, the concept of an atomised biopolitics becomes analytically useful in capturing the diffused yet deeply penetrating modalities of violence that persist in Gaza following Operation Protective Edge. In the absence of an immediate postbellum, visible agent, such as the Israeli military or an active battlefield, the legacy of environmental devastation continues to shape the conditions of life. What remains is not the spectacle of violence but its residue: polluted water, contaminated soil, and toxic air. In this context, necropolitical power manifests through overt acts of aggression as well as  the everyday, involuntary physiological processes such as breathing, drinking, and eating that now expose Palestinisan bodies to pathologies implanted within their ecologies.

This atomised form of necropolitics operates below the threshold of perception, internalised through cellular and metabolic interactions with environmental toxins. It is here that physiology and pathology converge to produce what might be termed pathophysiologies of slow violence. Without the detonation of a missile or the visible presence of a soldier, violence persists at a molecular level. As Foucault observed, modern power circulates in “capillary” fashion. Here, it infiltrates the bloodstream through heavy metals in drinking water or permeates the lungs through carcinogenic particles suspended in the air. This is necropolitics at its most insidious, dispersed, internalised, and rendered nearly indistinguishable from the basic conditions of existence.

A notable dimension of the report involves its mapping of the gendered disparities in exposure to toxic necropolitical regimes. It consistently identifies Palestinian women as disproportionately vulnerable to disease and illness induced by the environmental consequences of military action. This gendered differentiation is attributed to prevailing divisions of labour, which increase women’s exposure to environmental pollutants in domestic settings. In the case of contaminated water, for instance, the report explains that “women are the ones who use such water every day, multiple times to wash clothes and dishes, cook, clean children, etc. Thus, women’s extended exposure makes them more vulnerable to any changes in water quality.” These findings align with broader research that illustrates how Palestinian women have borne the brunt of environmental degradation under occupation. Elise Young, in her reading of Palestinian women’s pathologies within the colonial context, emphasises that the notion of health is not only historically contingent and gendered but also inextricably linked to processes of colonisation and the foundation of the Israeli nation-state. The differential impact of toxic exposure on women thus reflects a broader convergence between settler-colonial governance, environmental violence, and gendered necropolitics, where domestic labour becomes the site through which slow violence is both enacted and endured.

In his systematic documentation of the environmental consequences of Operation Protective Edge, Ahamad Saleh Safi devotes particular attention to what he categorises under “Environmentally Related Diseases.” He notes a striking consensus across affected areas: “In almost all localities (100%) people complained of increases in the spread of many diseases that may stem from environmental pollution.” The data collected in the report highlights a wide spectrum of health conditions attributed to wartime environmental contamination. Among the most frequently cited are skin diseases, including rashes and cancers (reported in 72% of localities), premature births resulting in death (48%), and respiratory illnesses (44%). Safi details the multiple vectors through which such conditions emerge, attributing them to air pollution, exposure to chemically contaminated seawater, and direct contact with pollutants and war remnants such as exploded shells and rockets. The health risks associated with these exposures include, but are not limited to, hepatitis, gastrointestinal disorders, eye and ear infections, skin contusions, and respiratory trouble. Significantly, Safi also acknowledges the possibility of undiagnosed or unclassified diseases emerging from toxic exposure, underscoring the full extent of harm as both measurable and incalculable within the necropolitical landscape of post-war Gaza.

The report proceeds to identify specific Gazan microgeographies most acutely affected by the war, dedicating several pages to tabulated data on what it terms “war-induced environmental pollution–induced diseases” across these localities. For example, one entry reads: “Locality: Al Nuseirat; Impacts: Skin disease, Cancer, Infant deaths, Congenital anomalies, Respiratory diseases; Gender: Women; Vulnerable Groups: Children.” The report’s tabular structure constructs a relational matrix that links geographic location, medical pathology, gendered patterns of vulnerability as perceived by participants, and the demographics most at risk. This configuration facilitates a shift from experiential testimony to clinical diagnosis, enabling a translation of lived experience into the evidentiary domain of medical science. However, while the report asserts that “these increases in incidences of disease are supported by the literature as a result of air pollution, seawater contamination, soil pollution, and use of unlawful weapons during war,” the cautious phrasing embedded in such claims highlights the epistemological complexity of tracing necropolitical harm in post-conflict ecologies. The ambiguity of causal attribution reflects the diffuse, atomised nature of necropolitical modalities operating in the wake of war, modalities that manifest not through spectacular violence, but through incremental, often imperceptible damage embedded in air, water, and soil. Though hard to verify individually, these atomised forms of harm have cumulative effects (mapped across spatial, gendered, and generational lines) that constitute a powerful archive of slow, environmental violence.

Atomised necropolitics operates by infiltrating the body of the exposed subject, embedding itself through the molecular agents of environmental toxicity. As a paradigmatic expression of slow violence, it enacts what Rob Nixon describes as the “persistence of unofficial hostilities in the cellular domain - the untidy, attritional lethality that moves through the tissue, blood, and bones.” This method of power collapses the boundary between the external environment and the body's internal physiology, as environmental contaminants become coextensive with the life-sustaining processes of the body. These processes, including breathing, ingestion, and metabolic function, are not only routes of survival but also pathways of harm, transformed into vectors of disease and degradation. From acute conditions such as eye inflammation caused by exposure to debris, and long-latency illnesses like cancer linked to genotoxic agents, the body becomes a site where toxicity and vitality converge.

In the occupied ecologies of Gaza, this toxic entanglement generates a necropolitical chiasma, an interlacing of organism and environment in which the body is no longer separable from the polluted microecologies it inhabits. The physiological becomes pathological. At the level of nucleic inscription, atomised necropolitics produces a condition where life’s genetic infrastructure is braided with particles of destruction. In this way, the very cellular fabric of Palestinian life is marked by a violence that is slow, intimate, and enduring, a necropolitical inheritance sedimented in the body through air, water, and earth.

Section Four: Toxic Entanglements: How Necropolitical Warfare Breeds Ecological Return

As proxies of the necropolitical state, harmful pollutants function in ways that fundamentally destabilise clear lines of causality, intention, and responsibility. By virtue of their proxy status, they introduce a conceptual and temporal gap between the material act of pollution and the originary actor responsible for its release. In Safi’s report, this distance necessitates both a recognition of symptom-diagnosis correlations and a series of qualifications that reflect the epistemic uncertainty embedded in postbellum toxic ecologies. These pollutants do not operate according to linear timelines or straightforward trajectories. Instead, they unfold within assemblages of pathogenic agents that interweave with the physiological processes of individuals and communities, giving rise to autoimmune pathophysiologies that resist definitive medico-legal attribution. Framed in Derridean biopolitical terms, this condition reflects the logic of autoimmunity: a process whereby systems of self-protection paradoxically turn against themselves, undermining their own integrity. In such contexts, violence is no longer exclusively external or easily attributable; it is internalised, recursive, and temporally dispersed. Atomised biopolitics thus functions by diffusing responsibility and obscuring the link between agent and effect. It generates a torsional logic that destabilises the binary of aggressor and victim, rendering the Palestinian body both the site of injury and, paradoxically, the perceived locus of threat. Within this autoimmune schema, the body becomes entangled in a regime of necropolitical harm that reproduces its own vulnerability under the guise of pathology.

The biopolitical consequences of autoimmune logic extend well beyond Palestinian bodies and their more-than-human ecologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By its very structure, necropolitical autoimmunity is inherently recursive. The very apparatus designed to insulate and protect the self ultimately loops back upon its originator. In this context, the Israeli state's destruction of Gaza’s sanitary infrastructure and its wastelanding of West Bank ecologies have produced epidemiological feedback loops that now affect the health and environments of Israeli civilians. The spiralling trajectory of autoimmune necropolitics undermines the imagined impermeability of borders, revealing instead the permeability and shared vulnerability of entangled ecologies.

A report titled Health Risks Assessment for the Israeli Population Following the Sanitary Crisis in Gaza highlights this transboundary exposure. It details how the collapse of Gaza’s sanitation systems and environmental degradation have had “multidimensional impacts” on the Israeli population. These include aquatic contamination—pollution of seawater, rivers, and drinking water reservoirs in Israel, as evidenced by the closure of the Ashkelon desalination plant, the Zikim bathing beach, and the Shikma groundwater facility. It also notes significant aerial fallout, with “severe air pollution” crossing into Israeli airspace. Most notably, the report highlights the emergence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens among Gazans, some of whom were treated in Israeli hospitals, inadvertently transmitting these pathogens to dozens of Israeli patients.

In effect, this reveals a disbursement of necropolitical agency across a network of non-human actors, including bacteria, wastewater, and airborne particulates, whose movements disregard political borders. What emerges is a scene of unintended ecological and pathogenic consequence, where settler-colonial violence directed outward rebounds inward, illustrating the ecological entanglement and mutual fragility masked by the logic of security. Autoimmune necropolitics thus not only erodes the bodies it targets but also destabilises Israeli governance.

In their analysis of Israel's deliberate destruction of infrastructure and livelihoods in the West Bank and Gaza, Erika Weinthal and Jeannie Sowers provide a comprehensive account of how the occupation has disrupted all major environmental sectors. They determined that: “In both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, we have found that Israeli control over land infrastructure, construction, land use and movement undermines civilian welfare even as the effects are ‘walled off’—literally and in public discourse—from the Israeli public and, increasingly, from the international community.” Their findings demonstrate how the deliberate targeting of water, energy, and agricultural systems forms a core component of the occupation regime—one that directly impairs Palestinians’ ability to remain on their land.

The Health Risks Assessment for the Israeli Population report highlights an example of the most acute consequences of Gaza’s deteriorating sanitary, environmental, and health conditions: a scenario in which individuals may experience an acute “unwillingness to continue living in the environment, perceived as being dangerous.” In contemporary public health and environmental literature, this is framed as the emergence of “environmental refugees.” In this context, Gaza’s prospective environmental refugees are not viewed through a humanitarian lens but as a biopolitical threat to Israeli national security, tethered to anxieties over the health of the Israeli population. The emergence of yet another form of Palestinian refugeedom (this time under the sign of environmental collapse) highlights Israel’s various strategies of displacement. It also signals the inscription of Palestinian bodies into the broader catastrophe narrative of planetary ecological breakdown. Crucially, the autoimmune entanglement whereby Israeli citizens are now enmeshed in the pathogenic feedback loops of Gaza’s environmental collapse reveals that no protective border can fully contain the consequences of ecological violence. As Bruno Latour observes, in the Anthropocene, “there are no more spectators” because “there is no shore that has not been mobilised in the drama of geohistory.” In the Palestinian context, this “generalised state of war” is not only locally embedded in practices of ecocidal destruction but also globally dispensed through the transboundary flows of pollutants, pathogens, and atmospheric effects, offering a stark reminder that the ecological stakes of necropolitical governance extend far beyond the immediate zone of occupation.

The necropolitical question of population health is, at its core, an autoimmune one, an inquiry rooted in the constitutive tensions between life and death. As Derrida asserts, “If autoimmunity is physiological, biological, or zoological, it precedes and anticipates all these oppositions.” Positioned within the Israeli-Palestinian context, the categories of the physiological, biological, and ecological help to shape the necropolitical intelligibility of “the Palestinian,” as constructed and governed within Israeli state discourse. Autoimmunity precedes these categories precisely because it forms the ontological condition through which the Israeli/Palestinian binary, and its violent asymmetries, are rendered intelligible. In necropolitical terms, each subject position is caught within the following entanglement: the existence of one is constitutively dependent on the differential subjugation of the other.

Within this aporetic fold, political autoimmunity emerges as a crucial analytic. As Derrida suggests, the notion of political autoimmunity is fundamentally bound to the interrelation among political subjectivity, nature, and bare life. Once situated within this conceptual framework, political autoimmunity is necessarily necropolitical. What is crystallised in this formulation is the inseparability of politics from bios, ,a foundational entwinement of governance and life itself, and the inherent politicisation of bare life, particularly as it pertains to the entangled dyad of Palestine and Israel.

The reports cited above reveal the autoimmune failure of Israel’s attempt to “wall off” Palestinian “pathogens”, a failure captured succinctly by Gideon Bromberg’s observation that “no fence or Iron Dome can thwart them.” In this context, the very logic of the Wall (whether physical, political, or epistemological) is breached, and its function as a necropolitical apparatus of policing, exclusion, and containment is rendered inoperative. Within the logic of autoimmune necropolitics, the binary oppositions of inside/outside and Palestinian/Israeli collapse into a topological entanglement. Autoimmune regimes of governance, by definition, rely on transgressions: they are animated by the very crossings they seek to prevent. These crossings occur across increasingly fractalised registers of state borders, ecologies, microbial terrains, human and non-human bodies, destabilising the supposed fixity of territorial, biological, and political boundaries.

The dual operations of atomised and transboundary necropolitics provoke a critical interrogation of the internal logics and structural coherence of Israel. These twinned methods expose what might be termed the co-constitutive astructurality of the settler structure: that is, the state’s very apparatuses of governance (those necropolitical mechanisms ostensibly designed to secure and consolidate settler power) are themselves marked by fissures, blind spots, and points of irreflection. Rather than functioning as a seamless and teleologically coherent system, Israel’s strategies for self-preservation and securitisation generate unintended consequences and ungovernable effects that undermine its structural integrity from within.

The transboundary movement of toxic agents produced by atomised necropolitics resists containment and unsettles the settler state’s “calculus of biopower”. These flows not only circumvent its infrastructures but also reverse the directionality of power, returning its effects to the settler body politic in the form of autoimmune fallout. In this way, the seemingly unidirectional exertion of settler violence is interrupted and rerouted, revealing the limits of Israel’s control over the necropolitical death world it has engineered.

In this light, Patrick Wolfe’s notion of “structure” risks over-totalisation, a reading that presumes a seamless, hegemonic logic of elimination. Yet, as this section has shown, the settler-colonial structure is constantly destabilised by the unanticipated consequences of its own actions. The hubris that inheres in the apparatus through its incapacity to anticipate or contain the full reach of its violence introduces a constitutive instability into the settler project. It is this astructurality within structure that guarantees, however marginally, the possibility of disruption, leakage, and undoing.

Conclusion

This paper has traced the necropolitical dimensions of both human and more-than-human life in occupied Palestine, examining how settler-colonialism and ecological destruction are intimately entwined in the Israeli occupation. By expanding the necropolitical aperture, it has shown the differential, often overlapping modalities through which violence (military, structural, and environmental) is enacted on both human and nonhuman life. It has foregrounded how such violence generates landscapes saturated with the traces of destruction, where shattered bodies, broken homes, and mutilated ecologies coalesce into sites of testimony. In such spaces, acts of dispossession leave behind a material archive of pain that is not solely anthropocentric but is shared across human and ecological forms.

Central to this project has been a commitment to decentering the anthropocentric logic of necropolitical theory. Drawing on Mbembe, Barakat, and Whyte, this paper has worked to articulate a necropolitics of environment that accounts not just for how sovereignty governs human death, but also for how it does so by entangling humans, animals, plants, soil, and water in webs of systemic obliteration. In Gaza and the West Bank, this manifests in water governance, arboreal uprooting, pollution, and land mutilation. These are acts animated by a necro-environmental regime, in which ecological destruction is both a mechanism of rule and a spatial expression of elimination.

Looking forward, further study on this should seek to offer a theoretical reconfiguration of justice. If necropolitics is to remain a meaningful analytic in an age of climate catastrophe and settler-violence, it must extend to a critique of anthropocentric legal frameworks. If the argument of this paper has been that Israel has been perpetrating an ecocidal, necropolitical regime over the occupied territories, the next intervention should be to consider what environmental justice in response to such a regime might look like While the ICJ, UN Charter and Vienna Conventions remain deeply state-centric, other branches of international law, including IHRL, ICL, IHL, refugee law and the ECHR, remain largely human-centric; true ecological justice therefore requires a more radical rethinking of geopolitics that takes the Earth itself as a political subject.

Furthermore, this work is not without its limitations. First, while the paper has foregrounded Gaza and the West Bank, the unevenness of field-specific data (particularly in ecologically focused policy reports) has at times required a level of abstraction due to the practical and political constraints on producing comparable ecological data under occupation. . Second, the conceptual scope of necropolitics and settler-colonialism is vast; this project has necessarily focused on particular instances, leaving others unexplored. Further research might fruitfully examine comparative settler contexts to trace ecocidal logic. Additionally, future work could incorporate Indigenous epistemologies more directly into methodological frameworks to deepen understandings of land, memory, and survival from non-Western ontologies.

Despite these limits, the hope is that this paper has contributed meaningfully to emergent scholarly and activist efforts that seek to politicise the ecological as a site of both violence and resistance. In a world convulsed by the intersecting crises of climate, colonialism, and war, it is important to listen more closely to the entangled crises of humans, trees, aquifers, and soil, and to build futures where their survival is not incidental, but central.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Alatout, Samer. 2006. “Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: Territory, population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel.” Political geography 25 (6): 601-621.

al-Shalalfeh, Zayneb, Fiona Napier, and Eurig Scandrett. 2018. “Water Nakba in Palestine: sustainable development goal 6 versus Israeli hydro-hegemony.” Local Environment 23 (1): 117-124.

Barakat, Rana. 2018. “Writing/righting Palestine studies: Settler colonialism, indigenous sovereignty and resisting the ghost (s) of history.” Settler colonial studies 8 (3): 349-363.

Braverman, Irus. 2023. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. N.p.: University of Minnesota Press.

Breaking the Silence. 2012. Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Breaking the Silence. 2015. “This is How We Fought in Gaza: Soldier's Testimonies and Photographs from Operation "Protective Edge" (2014).” Breaking the Silence. http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/pdf/ProtectiveEdge.pdf.

Broswimmer, Franz J. 2002. Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species. London: Pluto Press.

Bushbridge, Rachel. 2018. “Israel-Palestine and the settler colonial ‘turn’: From interpretation to decolonization.” Theory, Culture & Society 35 (1): 91-115.

Cook, Jonathan. 2019. “Uninhabitable: Gaza faces the moment of truth.” TruePublica. https://truepublica.org.uk/global/uninhabitable-gaza-faces-the-moment-of-truth/.

Corradin, Camilla. 2016. ““Israel: Water as a Tool to Dominate Palestinians.” Al-Jazeera. “Israel: Water as a Tool to Dominate Palestinians.

Coulthard, Glen S. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dajani, Muna. 2014. “Drying Palestine: Israel’s Systemic Water War.” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/drying-palestine-israels-systemic-water-war/.

Da'Na, Seif. 2013. “Israel's Settler-Colonial Water Regime: The Second Contradiction of Zionism.” Holy Land Studies 12 (1): 43-70.

Dana, Tariq. 2017. “A century of settler colonialism in Palestine.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 24 (1): 197-220.

De Landa, Manuel. 1991. War in the age of intelligent machines. New York: Zone Books.

DeLanda, Manuel. 2019. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Derrida, Jacques. 1998. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Edited by Gianni Vattimo. In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida, 1-78. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

el-Namey, Isra S. 2016. “Water pollution reaches catastrophic levels in Gaza.” Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/content/water-pollution-reaches-catastrophic-levels-gaza/16616.

Finkelstein, Norman. 2018. Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Prison Talk.” In Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, translated by Colin Gordon, 37-59. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.

Friends of the Earth. 2013. “Environmental Nakba: Environmental Injustice and Violations of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine: A Report of the Friends of the Earth International Observer Mission to the West Bank.” Friends of the Earth International, 1-16.

Gasteyer, Stephen, Jad Isaac, and Katie Hodali. 2012. “Water grabbing in colonial perspective: Land and water in Israel/Palestine.” Water Alternatives 5 (2): 450-468.

Graham, Stephen. 2002. “Bulldozers and Bombs: The Latest Palestinian- Israeli Conflict as Asymmetrical Urbicide.” Antipode 34 (4): 642-49.

Hermesh, Barak, Ma’ayan Maya, and Nadav Davidovitch. 2019. “Health Risks Assessment for the Israeli Population following the Sanitary Crisis in Gaza.” EcoPeace Middle East, 1-32.

International Committee of the Red Cross. n.d. “Wanton Destruction.” How does Law Protect in War - Online casebook. Accessed May 20, 2025. https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/wanton-destruction.

Isaac, Jad, and Jane Hilal. 2011. “Palestinian landscape and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” International Journal of environmental studies 68 (4): 413-429.

Jaber, Dina A. 2019. “Settler colonialism and ecocide: case study of Al-Khader, Palestine.” Settler Colonial Studies 9 (1): 135-154.

Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lloyd, David. 2012. “Settler colonialism and the state of exception: The example of Palestine/Israel.” Settler colonial studies 2 (1): 59-80.

Lorber, Ben. 2012. “Israel’s environmental colonialism and eco-apartheid.” International Journal of Socialist Renewal. https://links.org.au/israels-environmental-colonialism-and-eco-apartheid.

Lovitky, Jeffrey. 2024. “Rules Governing Property Destruction Outside of the Attack and Occupation Contexts - Lieber Institute West Point.” Lieber Institute. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/rules-governing-property-destruction-outside-attack-occupation-contexts/.

Malm, Andreas. 2025. The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. London: Verso Books.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press.

McKenna, Erin. 2015. “Land, Property, and Occupation: A Question of Political Philosophy.” In Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tomis Kapitan, 185-204. Armonk, New York: Taylor & Francis Group.

Molavi, Shourideh C. 2024. Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance. London: Pluto Press.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Omer, Mohammed. 2015. Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israels Gaza Assault. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Omer, Mohammed. 2015. “Not even animals are safe in Gaza.” Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/not-even-animals-are-safe-gaza.

Pugliese, Joseph. 2013. State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones. London: Routledge.

Rashed, Haifa, and Damien Short. 2012. “Genocide and Settler Colonialism: Can a Lemkin-Inspired Genocide Perspective Aid Our Understanding of the Palestinian Situation?” International Journal of Human Rights 16 (8): 1142-69.

Safi, Ahmad S. 2015. “2014 War on Gaza Strip: Participatory Environmental Impact Assessment.” Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Palestinian Environmental Ngos Network, and MA’AN Development Centre, 1-80.

Salamanca, Omar J., Menza Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. 2012. “Past is present: Settler colonialism in Palestine.” Settler Colonial Stidies 2 (1): 1-8.

Smith, Ron J. 2011. “Graduated incarceration: The Israeli occupation in subaltern geopolitical perspective.” Geoforum 42 (3): 316-328.

United Nations. 2015. “Report of the detailed findings of the independent commission of inquiry established pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution S-21/1.” United Nations: The Question of Palestine. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-178649/#:~:text=The%20present%20document%20contains%20the%20detailed%20finding%20of,findings%20and%20recommendations%20are%20provided%20in%20document%20A%2FHRC%2F29%2F52.

Voyles, Traci B. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Watts, Meriel, Tanya Lee, and Heather Aidy. 2016. “Pesticides and Agroecology in the Occupied West Bank.” Conclusions from a Joint APN-PANAP Mission in Palestine, 1-24.

Weinthal, Erika, and Jeannie Sowers. 2019. “Targeting infrastructure and livelihoods in the West Bank and Gaza.” International Affairs 95 (2): 319-340.

Weizman, Eyal. 2004. “The geometry of occupation.” Centre of Con temporary Culture of Barcelona (2004), 1-21.

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow land : Israel's architecture of occupation. London: Verso Books.

Whyte, Kyle. 2016. “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism.” Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism, (April), 157-73.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. London: Verso Books.

Young, Elise G. 1994. “Feminist politics of health care: The case of Palestinian women under Israeli occupation, 1979-1982.” In Women and the Israeli Occupation: The Politics of Change, edited by Tamar Mayer, 159-176. London: Rotutledge.

Zierler, David. 2011. The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.