Israel’s Physical and Ecological Destruction of Gaza

On 29 August 2024, I stood at a huge, but empty parking lot at Gaza’s southernmost parking lot at Kerem Shalom Crossing, against the intermittent loud booms of explosions in the nearby Rafah City, literally one kilometre away inside the genocidally besieged Gaza. I was with a 30-strong interfaith delegation of Christian, Jewish, and Hindu leaders, mostly from the United States,

In my less than 2 minutes Buddhist prayers, I invoked Nazi’s Final Solution – specifically mentioning the industrial mass killings at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest death camp complex immortalized Stephen Speilberg’s Oscar winner, Schindler’s List.

Alas, like the rest of the Holocaust Industry, including the administration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum of Poland, the renowned American Jewish movie director has chosen to keep his mouth shut when Israel is, without a doubt, perpetrating its own holocaust, livestreamed non-stop for 2 years. But that’s a story for another day.

Even back then, it was clear to me that Gaza is Israel’s Auschwitz, minus the gas chambers, where the SS exterminated, between 1942 and January 1945, 1.4 million Jewish and other identity-based victim populations, including Poles, anti-Nazi partisan resisters, Soviet Prisoners of Wars (POWs), Romani and Sinti people, pacifist Jehovah Witness faith adherents, disabled people and babies, toddlers and children from multiple groups.

During my whirlwind stop for prayers, next to Gaza’s southernmost crossing’s checkpoint in August 2024, even without Israel’s evident policy of explicitly adding Stalinist strategy of “death by hunger” the Soviet leadership deployed in Ukraine in 1932-33, I was persuaded by the emerging mountains of evidence that Israel wasn’t simply fighting the war against the Palestinian resistance, the Hamas.

But rather, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the Zionists’ SS equivalent, was executing the full-blown textbook genocide, that is, Hitlerite physical destruction of a targeted population of 2.3 million Palestinian people, in whole or in large part.

In their 1-August-2025 dated letter to US President Donald Trump, Commanders for Israel’s Security – 600 ex-generals, Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs, and senior diplomats – confirmed that Hamas’s military and governing apparatus had already been destroyed.

In his important study The Origins of the Final Solution, The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 ( 2004, published by Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem) the historian Christopher R. Browning noted that the mass extermination of the Jews in the Nazi-occupied Europe was the obsession of Adolf Hitler and the senior leadership of the Nazi regime.

In the audio-taped recordings made in his exile in Argentina post-World War II, the SS Colonel Adolf Eichman who was singularly responsible for organizing and transporting 400,000 Hungarian Jews by rail to Auschwitz, was emphatic that the Fuhrer, Hitler, ordered the “physical destruction” of the Jews as an unwanted population, “eternal mushroom” on German oak tree, in Hitler’s words.

It is worth noting that the SS executioner was receiving assistance in rounding up Hungary’s Jews from the Jewish Agency in Europe, headed by Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurian, the socialist Zionist leader, then based in the British-administered Palestine. As the well-known American Jewish commentator and talk-show host Katie Halper pointed out, the first priority of the Zionists who founded Israel by committing the first Holocaust or Al Nakba (the catastrophe) against the nearly 1 million Arab Palestinian natives in 1947-48, was the acquisition of the Arab lands for their ethno-nationalist “Jewish homeland”, not saving the Jews of Europe from the Nazi death and slave labour camps.

That Israel continues with its daily and nightly slaughter of Gaza’s Palestinian population, perfectly fits the Nazi genocide as spelled out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Nazis systematically pursued this genocidal objective in accord with the Final Solution, the accelerated industrial killing, under the cover of the escalating World War II.

However, there is something more chillingly sinister and anti-Environment about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and its multiple crimes of aggression, to use the legal discourse of the Nuremberg Tribunals, in its neighbourhoods of sovereign states including Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen.

While I continue to use the Nazi Germany (1941-1945) and Israel (October 2023-present) comparison to inform the opinion of public worldwide who are not students of genocide I am increasingly of the view that Israel’s version of its Holocaust, on-going in Gaza, has a far wider scope and more chilling design than the Nazis’ Final Solution (to the Jewish Question) aimed at the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The destruction of the natural or physical Environment in Gaza as part of Israel’s “war of annihilation” compels any student of genocide to explore new language or concepts, to really understand what Israelis are doing in Gaza beyond mass extermination.

My colleague at the Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia, a network of engaged scholars, Gill H. Boehringer, who is formerly dean at Macquarie University Law School, Sydney, Australia, had begun thinking beyond the legal definition of genocide. It is instructive to quote Boehringer (29 November 2023) at length:

The evidence and commentary I have seen from afar on both Al Jazeera (largely from a Palestinian perspective) and the Western media en blanc (from the IDF and Israeli officials past and present, and pundits) much of the physical evidence of devastation is the same or similar, showing very substantial areas of the Gaza strip, small and crowded as it is, has been flattened. The physical demolition of residences, churches, mosques, schools, clinics and much else; the killing of perhaps 20,000, the injuring of perhaps 30,000 Palestinians-many thousands young children and babies-is clearly Genocidal.

What is the connection with Ecocide? While much of the evidence will only be discovered in the future when the impact of the toxic bombs, shells from artillery and smaller weapons upon the waters – above ground and under – the dusty Gazan soil, and the flora and fauna-possibly even the fish along the coast- can be measured through scientific research, there can be no doubt that the natural environment has been very seriously affected negatively, probably for a very long time. Of course, some of the destruction of the natural environment is already clear to the naked eye.

Even a cursory glance at the emerging statistics on the severe destruction of the natural environment in Gaza and all other sovereign regions in Israel’s neighbourhoods is persuasive enough to the view that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is aimed not only at the extermination of 2.3 million Palestinians, in whole or any substantial part, but also at the destruction of the natural environment as the essential foundations of life for any sentient beings.

In passing, the world needs to be warned that the impact of Israel’s genocide in Gaza goes well-beyond the physical destruction or annihilation of totally besieged Palestinian population inside a narrow strip of Gaza. Its scope of destruction is evidently beyond Gaza, far more devastating than even the Nazis’ Final Solution.

The noted genocide scholar of UK, Emeritus Professor Martin Shaw of the University of Sussex, recently called attention to the fact that Israel’s genocide is “world changing” in that Israel is forging “a new genocidal mentality”.

But, equally worth pointing out is that the Environment itself becomes a target of physical destruction by the architects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, who have so far used the explosive power of the equivalent of the two nuclear bombs in the 28 mile-narrow strip of Gaza on the bank of the Mediterranean Sea.

While the Nazis’ Final Solution was aimed at exterminating the Jews of the Nazi-occupied Europe and expanding the living space for Nazi Germany’s chosen “pure blooded” Aryan Germans, Israeli political and military leaders have taken Lemkinian genocide to a whole new level. Yoav Gallant, On 18 October 2023, the 72-years-old ex-general Giora Eiland, a former National Security Advisor of Israel, issued his Gaza War Economy Brief Number 1, with the central theme of making Gaza “a place where no human being can exist.

• • In Gaza (and West Bank), UN damage assessments and UNOSAT/UN agencies quantified -the rubble at 53,466,870 tonnes by 4 April 2025 (an increase from ~22.9 million tonnes earlier). Much of this rubble is mixed with hazardous materials (asbestos, munitions) and human remains.
  • Upwards of ~92% (over nine in ten water supply systems) of Gaza’s water was judged unfit for human consumption after infrastructure damage and fuel shortages crippled treatment and desalination operations. That massively increases reliance on unsafe sources and heightens disease risk.
  • The Gaza Strip had one of the highest densities of rooftop solar panels in the world, with the U.S.-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimating in 2023 some 12,400 rooftop solar systems. But Israel has since destroyed a large proportion of Gaza’s burgeoning solar infrastructure, and broken panels can leak lead and heavy metal contaminants into the soil. Reuters’ news Gaza conflict has caused major environmental damage, UN says report quotes Eoghan Darbyshire, a senior researcher at the UK-based nonprofit Conflict and Environment Observatory, as saying, “… large areas of Gaza will not be recovered to a safe state within a generation, even with limitless finance and will.”
  • Scientific analyses and subsequent peer-reviewed studies indicate military operations release elevated levels of NO₂, SO₂, CO and particulate aerosols, while massive fires and dust from destroyed buildings and rubble produce hazardous PM2.5/PM10 loads — with both acute respiratory impacts and longer-term contamination of surfaces/soils.
  • According to the latest geospatial assessment carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), further deteriorating food production capacity and exacerbating the risk of famine in the area. The assessment indicates that as of April 2025, more than 80 percent of the Gaza Strip’s total cropland area has been damaged (12,537 hectares out of 15,053) and 77.8 percent is not accessible to farmers, leaving just 688 hectares (4.6 percent) available for cultivation. The situation is particularly critical in Rafah and in the northern governorates, where nearly all cropland is not accessible.
  • In their expert commentary, War and environmental health in Gaza (Volume 31, 2025), the two Turkish scientists from Turkey’s Hacettepe University Cavit Isık Yavuz and Sevilcan Basak Unal wrote, “(l)oss of natural resources and vital ecosystem services, hazardous wastes and contamination, and marine environment disruptions associated with the conflict are adding new dimensions to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. More than 25% of Wadi Gaza, one of the most vital coastal wetlands of the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, is destroyed, with environmental damages worth US$ 411 million (14). The destruction of ecosystems and critical environmental infrastructure is intensifying in Gaza. The problems that existed before the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have deepened and these problems will persist for decades post-war. Long-term political stability and resources will be needed to make the area liveable again.”

*Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide. He is the co-author (with Natalie Brinham) of the pioneering study, “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas” (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014) and “Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims” (The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Fall/Winter 2017/18).