Poisoned Earth
Helen Epstein on Gaza’s toxic soil
Gaza’s Deadly Soil
Helen Epstein
Long before October 2023, Gaza’s people suffered international sanctions, a humiliating occupation, and periodic Israeli bombardments. Few could leave the enclave, even for medical care; the destruction of crucial infrastructure meant that clean water and electricity were intermittent; and thousands of men, women, and children were killed in periodic wars. Even peaceful protests were met with lethal gunfire. But Palestinians still managed to carve out livelihoods in Gaza, and sustain a rich community life. There were drama, music, and dance performances and beaches crowded with picnicking families. Fishermen, when not fired on or arrested by the Israeli navy, landed sardines, tuna, and other Mediterranean delicacies, and farmers continued an eight-thousand-year tradition of tending olive trees and raising sheep, goats, and chickens.
The war turned this world into some sixty million tons of rubble. Last summer, writes the architect and human rights investigator Eyal Weizman, the Strip was blanketed with “enormous dust clouds containing particles of the different materials that formed the building[s] and [their] environment—concrete, plaster, paint, glass, metal, sand, soil—some of which are synthetic and toxic.” The dust “covered everybody’s skin, eyes, mouths, nostrils, it was present in food and water, and also covered the entire ground like a new layer of topsoil.”1
In the decades to come, an epidemic of cancer, lung disease, and brain damage caused by this fallout could come to rival in lethality the war’s bombs and bullets. Over the past year Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben-Gurion University, has been mapping major sources of contamination in Gaza by comparing satellite images from before and after the start of the war and combining that information with snapshots, drone footage, and reports from sources on the ground. With this information he is managing to reconstruct which buildings containing which toxins were blown up or burned when and near whom. Other groups, including Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, have also mapped the destruction in Gaza, but Garb’s analysis is starting to provide the most detailed modeling yet of its likely toxicological consequences.
The first paper drawn from this research will document asbestos contamination in two of what are likely to be many hotspots. Widely used as roofing in Gaza’s urban refugee camps and above the stairwells of apartment buildings, concrete containing asbestos is safe when intact, but when shattered it releases tiny fibers that are easily inhaled. Over decades they tear the lungs apart as the cells of the immune system futilely try to extract them, a process that frequently leads to emphysema and mesothelioma, an especially deadly form of lung cancer.
One place where asbestos was ubiquitous is the former site of the large, densely populated Jabalia refugee settlement, once home to 70,000 people before it was flattened completely in what even a former Israeli defense minister referred to as an act of ethnic cleansing. The demolished Jabalia site was occupied by displaced people for about a year, then largely evacuated in 2025. Now it is divided between depopulated Israeli-controlled territory and an area inhabited once again by displaced Palestinians.
The other hotspot Garb uses as a case study is the former site of Al Qarya as-Suwaydiya, or the Swedish Village, named for the international troops who helped rebuild the small, coastal Palestinian settlement there in the 1960s. Garb observes that the Swedish Village has housed dozens—perhaps cumulatively hundreds—of soldiers since the Israeli military began using the ruins and the few remaining buildings as an outpost in 2024. Each square yard of the village, he estimates, originally contained close to a pound of asbestos roofing, if spread evenly across it. But now that material has been shattered and pushed into the outpost’s protective rubble berms. The regular traffic of heavy military vehicles and repeated reworking of the land with bulldozers would have raised dust clouds full of suspended asbestos particles, no doubt inhaled by the drivers and soldiers downwind.
In other areas Garb has identified the blown-up remains of warehouses that once contained thousands of tons of dead lead-acid batteries, which Israeli restrictions long prevented Palestinians from exporting for safe disposal or recycling. Elsewhere he has detected black streaks on the ground, some more than half a mile long, indicating likely carcinogenic hydrocarbon contamination from industrial sites. The fallout could be similar to that produced by the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which caused elevated rates of nearly thirty diseases, including more than a dozen types of cancer, and killed more people than the attack itself.
To confirm Garb’s estimates, it would be necessary to test soil samples from the areas he has identified as particularly likely to be contaminated. But the Israeli government seems to be obstructing efforts to carry out such tests, let alone assist the current and future victims of this environmental catastrophe. Aid workers and others entering Gaza attend an official briefing where they are informed that it is forbidden to leave the enclave with even small amounts of soil or sand. Once in the Strip, any scientists surreptitiously collecting research material risk being spotted by overhead surveillance drones. At departure checkpoints every piece of luggage is emptied onto a conveyor belt, and border guards carefully inspect each item. Several people told me they knew researchers whose soil samples had been confiscated. Palestinian researchers in Gaza have no capacity to conduct such experiments on their own, since the enclave lost all twelve of its universities and scores of scientists in the bombing. Without the Israeli government’s cooperation, only remote assessment and modeling like Garb’s can even begin to determine the scale and location of toxic contamination in which Gaza’s population now lives.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
Homer vs. Hollywood:
A Live Q&A on Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” with Daniel Mendelsohn
You’ve seen the movie, you’ve read the fiery tweets and Instagram posts—now, you can discuss Christopher Nolan’s controversial blockbuster adaptation of the Odyssey with our expert Daniel Mendelsohn, Editor-at-Large of The New York Review and the most recent translator of Homer’s epic. In this special hour-long edition of NYRSeminars, Mr. Mendelsohn will briefly outline his own take on the film, which he reviewed at length for the Review, and then open the floor to questions from and discussion with audience members. Among the topics to be addressed are the debate over the film’s sets, ships, and costumes; the film’s handling of its female characters; and the question of whether the director’s vision of Odysseus represents a betrayal of the epic’s values.
