When the air strikes finally stopped, the sound that followed was silence — the kind of silence that feels heavy, thick with dust and disbelief. In Gaza, people began to emerge from the ruins of their homes, clutching the few things they could still find. Amid the broken concrete and twisted steel, there was another layer of destruction that few could see: the land itself.
The earth, long exhausted by years of blockade and war, had turned gray. Wells were tainted with salt and sewage. Fields once full of vegetables lay covered in debris. The sea, which for generations had fed the people of Gaza, was slick with waste. It wasn’t just buildings that had died here — it was nature.
For Naomi L. J. Rintoul-Hynes, an environmental researcher whose new study was published in the journal AMBIO in 2025, this quiet catastrophe is what worries her most. “Environmental degradation is not a side effect of war,” she writes. “It is one of its most enduring consequences.”
Her paper, “Environmental Considerations for Post-War Reconstruction of Gaza,” calls on policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and international donors to treat the environment as a core part of the rebuilding process. Without it, she warns, any recovery will be fragile — like a house built on poisoned soil.
The War After the War
Walk through Gaza today and you might think the war never ended. But the bombs have been replaced by something slower and equally lethal: pollution, erosion, and the slow unraveling of ecosystems that once supported life.
The study identifies three great wounds in Gaza’s landscape — pollution, habitat degradation, and habitat fragmentation — each feeding into the other.
First is pollution, the toxic legacy of conflict. Bombed factories leak chemicals into groundwater. Fuel spills from wrecked vehicles seep into the sand. Wastewater treatment plants, long overwhelmed, now lie in ruins, sending raw sewage into the Mediterranean.
Children play near blackened pools of water. Fishermen venture out to sea knowing their catch is no longer safe to eat. “Conflict pollution is often invisible but deeply persistent,” Rintoul-Hynes notes. Heavy metals, she explains, can remain in the soil for generations — silently poisoning crops and communities.
Then there is habitat degradation. The farmland that once fed Gaza’s families has been stripped bare or bulldozed. Olive trees, some centuries old, are gone. Even before the war, Gaza had one of the highest population densities on Earth; now, what little open space remains is covered by the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings.
The final wound is habitat fragmentation — the breaking apart of what remains of nature. Roads, walls, and expanding urban zones slice through fragile ecosystems, isolating patches of green that can no longer sustain wildlife. “When habitats become islands,” the study warns, “species vanish.”
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Rebuilding or Repeating the Past
As aid convoys roll in with cement and steel, the question looms: what kind of Gaza is being rebuilt?
If the goal is simply to restore what was lost, Rintoul-Hynes argues, the effort will fail. Because the old Gaza — even before the war — was already in crisis. Its aquifers were collapsing, its coastline eroding, its air thick with pollution from generators and trash fires.
To rebuild sustainably, she says, reconstruction must begin with environmental assessments — identifying areas contaminated by war debris, cleaning up hazardous waste, and restoring ecosystems alongside homes and hospitals.
It’s not an easy sell. In a place where people still sleep in tents and food is scarce, talk of biodiversity and soil health can sound abstract, even privileged. Yet the link between environment and survival is direct. If Gaza’s soil remains poisoned, crops will fail. If its water stays contaminated, disease will spread. If its coastal wetlands vanish, floods will follow.
“The environment is not separate from humanitarian needs,” Rintoul-Hynes insists. “It is the foundation of them.”
Nature as Infrastructure
Imagine Gaza rebuilt not only with concrete, but with green corridors running through its neighborhoods — patches of vegetation that absorb rainwater, provide shade, and connect surviving fragments of ecosystem. Picture rooftops with solar panels and gardens, communities managing their own waste through recycling and composting.
It may sound utopian, but these are the kind of visions emerging in environmental recovery plans worldwide, from Ukraine to Syria. Rintoul-Hynes believes Gaza, too, deserves this chance.
Her paper urges that environmental restoration be embedded in every reconstruction project, from road planning to housing. That means using recycled materials where possible, limiting sand extraction from beaches, and replanting native vegetation to anchor the soil.
It also means including local people — farmers, students, and volunteers — in decision-making. “Citizens are the best custodians of recovery,” the study says. “They know where the wells used to be clean, where the trees once grew.”
But Gaza’s environment doesn’t exist in isolation. The territory’s rivers, coastlines, and air are part of a regional ecosystem that extends into Israel and Egypt. Sewage leaking from one side becomes a health hazard on the other. Pollution respects no borders.
That makes environmental cooperation not only a matter of science but of politics — and peace.
The paper calls for regional environmental diplomacy, where recovery projects are shared and coordinated. It also appeals to international donors to ensure their reconstruction funding includes sustainability clauses — preventing the rush to rebuild from creating new ecological disasters.
“True peace,” Rintoul-Hynes writes, “is not possible on poisoned ground.”
A Future Grown from Ruins
Despite the devastation, hope persists — small, fragile, but real. In some neighborhoods, residents are already planting trees among the ruins. Local NGOs are teaching children to turn debris into planters, or to reuse plastic waste as building material. Fishermen are organizing to monitor coastal pollution using handheld sensors provided by foreign universities.
These efforts are what the study calls “micro-reconstructions” — small-scale actions that restore not just the land, but a sense of agency. They show that even in the most broken places, life finds a way.
For Rintoul-Hynes, these local movements are the seeds of something larger. If nurtured, they could form the foundation for a green recovery — one that heals both people and planet.
Her message is clear: the work of reconstruction is not only about rebuilding walls. It’s about restoring relationships — between humans and their environment, between survival and sustainability, between the ground and those who walk upon it.
In the end, the war may have shattered Gaza’s skyline, but the deeper damage lies underfoot — in the soil, the sea, and the air. Rebuilding without healing these wounds would be like setting a broken bone without aligning it: the pain would never truly end.
As night falls over Gaza, the city glows dimly with generator light. Somewhere in the dark, a child waters a small plant growing in a cracked pot — a green sprout in a gray world. It is an act of hope, as fragile as the land itself, and as necessary.
Because as Rintoul-Hynes reminds us, the path to peace is not paved only with concrete. Sometimes, it begins with a seed. (Sulung Prasetyo)
Source:
Rintoul-Hynes, N. L. J. (2025). Environmental considerations for post-war reconstruction of Gaza. AMBIO, 54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02246-1
