Gaza and the world’s moral collapse: genocide, ecocide and the price of impunity

One of the main occupied Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip, has become one of the most consequential moral and legal tests of the contemporary international order.

Beyond the overwhelming human toll, the scale of environmental destruction documented by United Nations bodies has raised urgent questions about whether international law – and international journalism – are capable of adequately capturing the full scope of such environmental annihilation being inflicted. Increasingly, scholars describe this intersection as involving both genocide and ecocide, exposing a widening accountability gap.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), by 2025 the Gaza Strip had generated more than 61 million tonnes of debris, one of the most severe debris crises ever recorded in a densely populated territory. UNEP reports that approximately 78% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The environmental collapse extends to agriculture: 97% of tree crops, 95% of shrubland and 82% of cropland have been devastated, dismantling the Gaza Strip’s food-producing ecosystem and long-term ecological resilience.

Water and sanitation systems have largely collapsed. Wastewater infrastructure has been destroyed or rendered nonfunctional, resulting in untreated sewage entering land and coastal waters. 

UNEP warns that rubble contains asbestos, heavy metals and chemical residues, which, in addition to the immediate massive damage, it nonetheless is creating long-term risks for soil, groundwater and public health. These vast impacts are not temporary wartime disruptions but, potentially, generational environmental contamination.

Marine ecosystems have also been badly affected. UN coastal assessments indicate that untreated sewage and contaminated runoff are entering the eastern Mediterranean, degrading coastal water quality and threatening fisheries, biodiversity and nearshore marine habitats already under highly extensive ecological stress.

Despite this vast scale of the documented environmental destruction, a significant imbalance exists in international journalism. While military operations, political negotiations and casualty figures dominate global news cycles, however, sadly, the ecological dimension, though extensively documented by UNEP and UN-linked bodies, receives comparatively limited sustained coverage. Environmental destruction is often reported episodically, rather than as a central analytical framework.

This gap is reinforced by structural patterns in journalism: event-driven reporting prioritises immediate violence; environmental damage is cumulative and technical; and restricted access to the Gaza Strip limits independent ecological investigation. As a result, the massive destruction of ecosystems is frequently under-framed, despite its centrality to long-term civilian survival.

In Gaza 97% of tree crops, 95% of shrubland and 82% of cropland have been devastated

This is where the concept of ecocide becomes urgent and critical. Defined by legal experts as widespread or long-term environmental destruction carried out with knowledge of substantial harm, ecocide remains not recognised as a standalone international crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Environmental harm is only partially addressed under war-crime provisions and only under exceptionally high thresholds.

The Gaza Strip, therefore, exposes a dual accountability gap: in law and in narrative. International humanitarian law already prohibits attacks on civilians and requires proportionality and distinction, yet, enforcement remains inconsistent. 

At the same time, international media systems often fail to fully integrate such intentional massive environmental destruction into their dominant framing of war.

This imbalance matters. Without sustained adequate and proper visibility, ecological devastation risks being treated as secondary to human casualties, despite being inseparable from them. This is why some international lawyers now use the term ‘eco-genocide’ meaning a unified process where: the people are targeted (genocide) and the land and the environment are simultaneously destroyed (ecocide) ensuring long term uninhabitability.

The environmental massive damage in Gaza is expected to have long lasting effects, with the experts warning that it will take many decades for the toxic chemicals to break down and for the marine ecosystem to recover. Furthermore, the deliberate strategic environmental destruction is so extensive that it threatens to make the region a wasteland.

The destruction of water, land, agriculture and marine systems is not collateral, it undermines the very conditions necessary for life.

Ultimately, the Gaza Strip forces a reconsideration of both legal and informational frameworks. If genocide concerns the destruction of human groups, ecocide concerns the destruction of the ecological systems that sustain them. Both dimensions are present in the Gaza Strip, yet, neither is fully addressed with proportional consistency.

Considering such relatively unprecedented omnicide, the question is no longer whether the destruction is documented. It is whether law and the global systems that report it are capable of naming it fully and ensuring accountability follows evidence, not silence.

Samir AbouHussein is a medical consultant.