The Gaza Valley is the estuary of Nahal Bisur, a stream mentioned in the Bible. West from Hebron in the West Bank, through Israeli territory and Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea. Today, after 18 months of war, the Gaza Valley is characterized by “pollution from debris, exported water, bodies, ammunition and explosives”, in the words of Nada Majdalani, the Palestinian director of the Palestinian Ecopeace Middle East.
However, the spring is still immigration season In Israel and Palestine. This region constitutes a narrow prominent bridge that joins Europe, Asia and Africa, and one of them represents The most crowded flight tracks About 500 million birds. Many of them – Flamingus, Sad, shots, cranes – in the Gaza Valley, is one of the few natural provinces in the Gaza Strip, which has grown to one of the most populated areas in the world over the past two decades due to Israeli restrictions.
Pictures of Ahmed Zakot/Sob
This is the world’s dry region for the number of people who support it, and the scarcity of water is getting worse because it is accompanied by the fastest twice the global average. Eighty percent of the drinking water in Israel comes from Ocean decomposition. In Gaza, Sea water storming Underground tank pollution that was friendly once due to excess pressure. While Israel and other forces in the region continue to store resources and environmental destruction, there is also a stubborn small movement for cross -border environmental peace, who have continued throughout the current war.
Organizations such as Ecopeace, Arava Institute for Environmental StudiesAnd Land for everyone – The three work with the joint Palestinian and Israeli leadership – collectively for decades, towards a vision that focuses on the supervision and joint of natural resources and sustainable development as a basis for permanent peace. They persevere until now, after Israel violated a stopping of several weeks in March with another round of bombings, killing, and cutting aid to Gaza, and when the prevailing political correspondence has become, according to Arrava, Barack Talmour said, “He has become so extreme that agriculture or sympathy between the two sides challenges.”
Water -based environmental and health risks are transmitted across the border, just like Nahal Bisur. Yasmine Abu Frya, an Israeli citizen and a doctor of Palestinian origin, is advised to land for all, a political group calling for a state union. She was working in a hospital in southern Israel in the first few months of the war. There, I dealt with Israeli soldiers who suffer from dysentery and rare fungal infections that are due to drinking water in Gaza. “In Israel and Palestine, what we see is that our lives are intertwined with each other,” she said. “The health of the Palestinians affects the health of the Israelis and vice versa. The best example is water.”
Eileen Dunder / Arva Institute for Environmental Studies
This fact can sometimes force the settlement. The Middle East enables non -profitable Ecopeace Ecopeace to benefit from the connection of healthy water to bring modern wastewater treatment to Gaza before the war. Ecopeace had Israeli beaches that were tested directly northern Gaza, and found E.Coli pollution in the sand. A technician in the laboratory also funded that unimportant solid waste from Gaza was blocking and closing an Israeli desalination facility.
“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Gidain Bumberg said that the wastewater crisis in Gaza is threatening the water security in Israel, which we must deal with, that the wastewater crisis in Gaza threatens the water security in Israel, we must deal with it. “
Even after the Hamas attack on October 7 on Israel, Bromberg said, they were able to summon the same principle of common health destiny after Israel closed the three water pipes that are supplied with the highest water drinking water in Gaza. Ecopeace received the leadership of Israeli public health experts to sign a speech saying: “You will see many diseases, and you will not stop in Gaza.”
“It was very effective,” he said. “It expands the zero thinking to understand that this is the loss.”
During the first week, the drinking water pipeline was reopened, and at the end of the three. (Recently, in March 2025, Israel reduced the power to two desalination plants in Gaza, again Waterproof As an Ecopeace weapon responds by pressure on the government).
Anya Kamentz / Grist
The environmental situation today in Gaza is worse than ever. The war left an estimated 40 million tons of rubble and 900,000 tons of toxic waste from the buildings that were destroyed in Gaza, according to Modern report From the Arava Institute; Not to mention, again, an increasing amount of raw wastewater. The World Health Organization warns that infectious diseases, which result from water scarcity, can kill the people of Ghazan more than Israeli bombs, and researchers are concerned about new breeds of bacteria that resist antibiotics that flourish as soap and water washing is rare.
BARAK Talmor is the director of the Jumpstarting Institute project at the ARAVA Institute, one attempt to respond to these conditions. In its first invasion of direct humanitarian aid, the Educational Institute and Research gathered money and holding an alliance to bring some sustainable technologies outside the network that was developed there and other places to Gaza. These include Laguna, a solar -powered water treatment unit that uses algae to filter wastewater; Watergen, machines that pull drinking water from the air; Outside of the network desalination units, the bioster that transforms wastewater gas into cooking gas. This was appointed to supply the refugee camp in Khan Yunis and a hospital. But the approval lasted for months, and the donor equipment is currently sitting in warehouses and at the border thanks to another aid station. “If I have any gray hair, it is from last year,” said Talmour.
Despite these harsh facts, members of Ecopeace and ARAVA and the land of all say that their joint commitment to sustainability has enabled them to maintain strong cross -border relationships. This is in itself a challenge when any hint of “normalization” or the Israeli -Palestinian dialogue is distorted due to what Bromberg “spoilers” calls on both sides.
Abdullah Khatib is part of a new generation of Palestinian environment peace builders, and he said it is a single road, especially since the war. ))
The West Bank preacher did not leave three years ago when he was accepted in a semester at the Arva Institute, and he studied environmental sciences in southern Israel as well as his Palestinian, Israeli colleagues and Jordanian students. He said he only applied to overcome checkpoints and see more world. “I did not care about the environment, on peace, about anything like that. Arava attracted me with free food, the pool. Once I was there, miracles occurred.”
KHATEB admitted, by chance, one of his Israeli colleagues. It was one day a soldier guarding his village. Through the moderate weekly dialogue sessions of the Arva Institute, they listened to each other’s experiences and created friendship. Now, he traveled to Northern Ireland and to England to participate in a dialogue alongside Israeli peace activists. After obtaining certificates in civil engineering and water, he is now training with Laguna, which has two wastewater treatment units outside the network installed in the West Bank. It works on better ways to convert solid materials into cooking gas.
“Water joint” is visible here in the West Bank in the storage tanks that were seen only on the Palestinian roofs; They are forced to buy drinking water, while the Israelis close to illegal settlements irrigation Their crops. As for KHATEB, “Peace Building is not only related to dialogue. It is also political, financial, educational and technological. For this reason I work on water and the environment. It provides opportunities. Everyone loves new innovations.”
Promberg, a lawyer, was established, along with Jordanian environmentalists, Egyptians and Palestinians in the mid -1990s. At that time, their plan was to cooperate to prevent excessive development that was expected in the wake of the Oslo agreements that bring peace and with it, increasing tourism to the region. It goes without saying that this did not come to pass, and the mission of the Ecopeace is the focus of the environmental follow -up after the birth of peace, to the modeling of peace through the environment. (In the late 1990s, the Egyptians withdrew under pressure from President Hosni Mubarak.)
As environmental scientists, he said: “We are all coming from a technical position where we strongly understand that the border is man -made. We have to look at the water gatherings and water basins. There, the borders are hiding the road.” During the second uprising in the early first decade of the twentieth century, they launched the Good Water NeighBors project. Ultimately, 28 community collaborated on both sides of the rivers and tables in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan, in campaigns to preserve the water bodies that divided and united them.
After October 7, Bromberg and his counterparts in Jordan and Palestine were invoked to speak every day, to combat the wrong information that was mired on all sides. “We had employees at all our offices losing family members in the war. He said. They also lost a Gaza colleague, a consultant.” He was a nightmare. ”
One who recently resumed. “Every day you open your eyes, and you wonder whether you are on the right track or not,” said Magdalani, Palestinian Director of the Environment. “But then we are facing ourselves – if this is not the way to do this, then what do not accept the current situation. We need to highlight a different narration from each other. What we all want for us and our children in the future is peace and stability.”
She said that what makes her continues is thousands of students, teachers, young professionals and other stakeholders who “walk on the road” next to them.
Their educational programs are more popular than ever. All the three Ecopeace managers in Washington, DC, were at the March meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and members of Congress on the sustainable development plans for railways, expanded renewable energy, and the port of Gaza is new.
“We participate in understanding that this war will end and that we are all responsible for making sure that we stop suffering,” said Bromberg.
Although she does not like the Trump administration’s statements regarding Gaza, Majdalani said: “The important part is not to close the opportunity to communicate. But try to find an opening where we can actually put ideas on the table that brings attention to all parties.”
