Israel’s Bombs Will Go On Killing Gazans Long Into the Future

Given how these weapons were used, “failure” isn’t the right word. Israel culminated its concerted targeting of civilian infrastructure across the country by dropping millions of cluster munitions on southern Lebanon. Ninety percent of these were fired in the final 72 hours before a ceasefire was called, according to the UN. Many of the munitions were “well past their shelf life…. The Israelis knew how old they were and they knew that they weren’t going to work,” said the Lebanon program manager for the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center, in 2007. Except, if the Israelis knew the weapons were expired, then wasn’t the high dud rate the point? These weapons weren’t “not working,” just working differently than advertised. Israel has for decades used cluster bombs functionally as mines dropped from the sky, intended for after the ceasefire, in Lebanon’s case when hundreds of thousands of displaced people returned home.

International pressure to ban the use of cluster bombs increased significantly following Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bars their use, went into force in 2010. It has been ratified by 112 countries, including Lebanon, Laos, and Palestine. Neither the United States nor Israel—both producers of these munitions—is party to the convention, the former citing their “clear military utility,” the latter following in lockstep, each sitting on its own significant cluster bomb stockpiles, each carried by economies dependent on imposing, manufacturing, and monetizing premature death.

In 2007, Time published a story titled “The ‘toys’ that kill in Lebanon.” The munitions Israel had “left behind” were often ambiguously shaped, unassuming—which explains why curious children picked them up, losing limbs and often their lives. Unexploded weapons reflect, in this instance, an unsuccessful occupier’s attempt to continue its attack on the people of the land. The abiding possibility of stepping on an unexploded ordnance mutates a person’s relationship with their land, imposing a wariness that precedes everything else. Children growing up in this aftermath learn to fear as they learn to play. It functions simultaneously as both a reminder and an assertion of empire’s steady grip, the lurking specter of its omnipresence: You dared to think you could exist beyond us. Of course, the hold of cluster bombs isn’t restricted to the psyche—a cluster bomb is a material thing, and exploding a child is an act of sustained war.

As an arm of its genocide, Israel is committing ecocide, the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s natural environment. The impacts are multivalent. Gaza’s agricultural sector comprises a significant part of its economy. A report released by the United Nations Satellite Centre in January 2024 showed “a substantial decline in the health and density of crops” compared to the previous six seasons, starting in 2018. Israel has “comprehensively targeted” Gaza’s olive trees, destroyed its main sources of vegetable production, and “executed” “entire groups of livestock farms.” One of Israel’s early targets was Gaza’s strawberry fields, known as its “red gold” and harvested every November, partially for export to the West Bank and Israel. Despite the significant barriers imposed by Israel in the past, the strawberries had for decades allowed many in Gaza to generate some kind of income.

Whether or not the strawberries and other crops will grow back depends in part on the topsoil. When an unexploded ordnance detonates, whether the detonation is controlled or not, the blast displaces this topsoil, with significant long-term ecological consequences, including on biodiversity. Demining also requires topsoil dispersal and, “depending on the ecosystem, it can take 1,000 years to generate just [three] centimeters of topsoil.” Whether the crops grown on this earth are safe to eat in the near term is a different question, and one that will ultimately take generations to answer.

Palestine’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency has called for an investigation into whether Israel is using depleted uranium, which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, against Gaza. In both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel has been using white phosphorus, a highly flammable agent that when fired hangs in narrow plumes of bright white smoke, like a toxic weeping willow suspended midair. White phosphorus’s burn patterns are also distinctive; upon contact with human skin, it penetrates, all the way to bone or until the oxygen runs out. White phosphorus pollutes the air and disrupts the soil’s pH. In southern Lebanon, entire fields of crops have been destroyed because of it; olive trees are the most affected, their harvest coated in toxins. Soil samples have been sent out for testing, to determine how the land has been affected by Israeli bombs, and what can be done about it. In Gaza in late June, starving children who resorted to eating tree leaves were brought to Kamal Adwan Hospital with signs of poisoning. Israel regularly uses Gaza as a weapons testing lab. Doctors have been reporting new, unfamiliar patterns of injury; the long-term biohazardous consequences of these unknown munitions remain similarly unclear.

Already, as a result of Israel’s bombing campaigns of 2022, 2021, 2018, 2014, 2008, and so on, as well as the repeated targeting of Gaza’s public health infrastructure, its earth was laced with toxins whose detrimental effects on its people will continue to be detected, slowly, for generations. On October 7, the head of UNMAS was already in Gaza, working to continue to clear the unexploded ordnances left there by Israel in 2021. As unexploded munitions erode, they release hazardous chemicals into the earth and groundwater. Even before October, 97 percent of the water in Gaza was unfit for human consumption. In a conversation with Al Jazeera from 2021, a man named Muhammad from northern Gaza said he’d struggled to grow a garden in his home because of the water’s chemical composition. “All my plants dried up and died because of high water salinity and high chloride,” he said. Muhammad said he had been unable to use the municipal tap water for years. He then posed a question that answers itself: “If the plants have died because of this water, what will it do with people’s bodies?”

Israel’s war against Palestinian life targets the people and the land—the land, to weaponize it against the people. In Gaza today, Israel has targeted the desalination plants, the wells, the water tanks, and the engineers working to rebuild these (which is to say, undermining Israel’s efforts). They have targeted individuals trying to collect water for their families. If or when there’s a ceasefire, the water the people are finally able to reach could kill them, too.

Per the UN definition, an unexploded ordnance becomes an “explosive remnant of war” once a conflict is technically over. I hesitate to use this term for Israel’s wars, because “remnants” implies violence positioned in the past. It suggests that its trickles into the present are a spillover unintended by the party responsible once “done is done.” For Israel in Palestine, done is never done: Settler colonialism’s aggressive violence against the people of the land is structural, and it is relentless. In the so-called day after, Israel will continue its war on Palestine’s children, its future, as it has for generations. The shapes and means will continue to morph as the tools and circumstances (and state sponsors) allow. We are, at the time of this writing, over 100 days past the estimates of the UNMAS report.

The final six lines of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s poem “The Deluge and the Tree,” read, “When the Tree rises up, the branches / Shall flourish green and fresh in the sun / The laughter of the Tree shall leaf / Beneath the sun/ And birds shall return / Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.” The trees in Gaza, those which remain rooted, continue to tunnel into the soil of a land called Palestine that Israel has worked to make unfit for life. And the children who pick the tree’s fruits, who pluck ripe strawberries off tiny stems, who drink from the wells and swim in Palestine’s sea, suffer the consequences of a people unwilling to abandon their land. They will, as the people of the land, develop certain cancers at rates far higher than expected for the average person living on this burning earth. And they will—so long as Israel’s siege over Gaza persists—regularly be denied access to medical treatment, often until it’s too late. Every day that passes is many more futures denied, and we are liable, before whatever good we believe in, for all of it.

And every day they have, the people of Gaza, of Palestine—who are of this writing rebuilding Al-Shifa hospital for the second time since October, who have set up health clinics in tents to try to bypass the death machine—their laughter will leaf beneath the sun. And their soil will, after some years, turn over, and the concentrations of the free radicals, half-life after half-life, will steadily approach zero. It will take time, and time, as every occupier knows, is on the native’s side.