Report: Deliberate Ecocide a Key Element of Israel’s Genocidal Campaign in Gaza

As Palestine’s Land Day approaches, Israeli forces have destroyed roughly 40 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land.

The widespread destruction Israel’s military has inflicted on Gaza’s farmland and agricultural infrastructure amounts to a “deliberate act of ecocide,” according to a new investigation that uses satellite imagery to survey the extent of the damage.

Released Friday ahead of Palestine’s Land Day, the analysis by the London-based research group Forensic Architecture (FA) shows that Israel’s ground forces — including tanks and other military vehicles — have advanced over half of Gaza’s farms and orchards, critical food sources that the besieged enclave’s population has worked tirelessly to cultivate in the face of decades of occupation.

“Since 2014, Palestinian farmers along Gaza’s perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces,” FA said. “Along that engineered ‘border,’ sophisticated systems of fences and surveillance reinforce a military buffer zone.”