The Nation magazine published an article by Joshua Frank in which he said that brutality for Israel is the goal of its campaign against Gaza. He emphasized in his article that Israel's goal in bombing the Gaza Strip was to make it an uninhabitable place by the end of its merciless military campaign.

  In the beautiful space of the beach in central Gaza, one mile away from the beach camp, which has now been razed to the ground, there were black pipes lying on the ground, placed by soldiers before they disappeared underground. This is a picture broadcast by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and it shows numbers of soldiers placing the pipes and what appears to be Stations for pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea to underground tunnels. The plan, as reports indicate, is to flood the vast network of tunnels that Hamas is said to have built and is using in its operations.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Herzl Halevy, said, “I do not want to talk about the details, but they include explosives for destruction and means to prevent Hamas activists from using the tunnels and harming the soldiers.” “Any means that gives us an advantage over the enemy [who uses the tunnels] and depriving him of this asset means that we are returning Evaluate this, and this is a good idea.”

This is not the first time that Hamas tunnels have been vandalized using water. In 2013, Egypt flooded the tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle goods and weapons between the two countries for more than two years. Egypt used Mediterranean water in the operation, causing devastation to the environment in Gaza. The groundwater became contaminated with salts, became saturated with mud and unstable, causing landslides and killing large numbers of people.

  When the soil becomes saturated with salt water and the drinking water is polluted, it becomes difficult for people to use it. Israel's strategy against Hamas will undoubtedly cause the same irreparable damage. Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, said: “It is important to keep in mind that we are not just talking about water saturated with salt. Seawater is polluted with waste that cannot be treated and flows into Gaza’s sewage system, which suffers from problems and malfunctions.”

The writer says that this, of course, seems to be part of Israel's goals, not only dismantling Hamas' military capabilities but also polluting groundwater that is already polluted from sewage leaking from corroded pipes.

  Israeli officials were clear that they would make sure Gaza was uninhabitable when they stopped their military operations. Defense Minister Yoav Galant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” and “We will erase everything and they will regret it.” If the destruction was not enough, as indiscriminate bombing destroyed 70% of Gaza's buildings, flooding the tunnels with salt water will cause structural damage to the remaining buildings in a way that makes repair impossible.

Abdul Rahman Al-Tamimi, director of the Palestinian Water Experts Group, says that flooding the tunnels with salt water will lead to salt accumulation and soil collapse, leading to the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes. Its outcome will not be more shocking: “The Gaza Strip will become depopulated, and the environmental effects of the war will not be eliminated until after 100 years.”

In conclusion, Al-Tamimi says that Israel is destroying the environment in Gaza and has begun to destroy its olive fields. Every year, Gaza produced 5,000 tons of olive oil from 40,000 trees. Last year's olive season coincided with the beginning of the war, and it is a season that Palestinians await because it brings them hope, livelihood, and happiness. The percentage of olive oil in Gaza's economy last year was 10% of the total economy, or $30 million. Of course, last year, olives were left on their trees, and Israel destroyed agricultural lands, through a scorched earth policy.

Satellite images show that 22% of agricultural land in Gaza has become empty. Ahmed Odeh from Khuza’a says, “Our hearts are broken over the crop,” and “We cannot irrigate or care for the land, and after every devastating war we pay thousands of shekels to ensure the quality of our crop and the suitability of the land for agriculture.” The war it waged on Gaza left a devastating impact and left more than 23,000 dead, most of them women and children.

Since 1967, Israel has uprooted more than 800,000 trees to build settlements in the West Bank or for purposes it says are security or merely Zionist revenge. Harvesting olives has been a known custom in the Eastern region since ancient times, and hence the uprooting of its trees “is linked to irreversible climate changes, the eradication of the soil and the reduction of yields,” as the Yale Review magazine said in 2023. Uprooting olive trees is a destruction of the Palestinian environment, as olive trees are A refuge for several types of birds, such as the khussairi, the masked crow, and the sunbird. It is important for the environment, as Simon Awad Omar wrote in the 2017 issue of the Jordanian Journal of Natural History, “The olive fields of Palestine can be considered a cultural space designed as a global agricultural system due to the combination of biodiversity, culture, and economic values.” The ancient olive tree is a testimony to the Palestinians and their longing for freedom.

In addition to polluting the soil, Israel pollutes Gaza from the air, as Amnesty International and the Washington Post documented several cases of the use of white phosphorus. “The Gaza operation is one of the most intense punitive campaigns in history,” says Robert Pabb, a professor at the University of Chicago, and “it stands at the top of the bombing campaign box forever.” The writer believes that it has never happened in the history of wars that the perpetrators of a crime revealed their intentions, as was stated in the South African file submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, as happened in Gaza. As Israeli President Isaac Herzog tried to put it, justifying the massacres against the Palestinians, “The entire nation there is responsible [for October 7] and all this rhetoric about civilians not knowing or not being involved, is absolutely untrue.”

“They could have risen up or fought the evil regime.”

We have not witnessed a military campaign supported by Joe Biden and the foreign policy team in which violence was committed and occurring in real time in the media and communication platforms. Gaza, its people and its land, have suffered from it over the centuries, but the latest campaign has polluted its land and turned it into an unlivable area, and its effects will appear on future generations.