In a Middle East exhausted by decades of conflict, the consequences of war extend far beyond human casualties and physical destruction. They penetrate soil, groundwater and entire ecosystems through burning oil, unexploded ordnance and heavy metals, leaving damage that can persist for decades after military operations have ended.
According to a recent study published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Middle East reached its highest level of armed conflict in 2025. The persistence of these conflicts has gradually transformed large areas into centres of environmental fragility.
When human actions cause severe, widespread and long-term environmental damage, their effects stretch far beyond the period of military confrontation.
Whether direct or concealed and gradual, such destruction is increasingly viewed as a form of “ecocide”.
Researcher Rob Nixon also describes this phenomenon through the concept of “slow violence”, violence that unfolds gradually and largely out of sight, accumulating over time in ways that make it difficult to detect or directly connect to the original moment of destruction.
The Vietnam War marked a major turning point in global awareness of such damage. Between 1964 and 1975, the United States used chemical herbicides to strip vegetation, most notably Agent Orange. The consequences helped expose the scale of the environmental and health catastrophe unfolding both during and after the war, and demonstrated the capacity of military operations to cause long-term environmental damage affecting populations and ecosystems for generations.
In Gaza, “futuricide is a dynamic of ecocide” that destroys not only the present, but also the conditions that allow a society to imagine and build a future across every sphere of life.
Gaza: The Assassination of the Future
In this context, the extensive bombardment carried out during the Israeli aggression and the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip have left deep scars across the territory’s entire ecological system.
Research by Forensic Architecture has documented the systematic bulldozing of Gaza’s eastern strip since 2014. By the beginning of 2024, around 40 per cent of land used for food production had already been destroyed.
Anthropologist Stephanie Latte Abdallah uses the term “futuricide”, or the assassination of the future, to describe this reality: destroying the land means destroying the future of those who live on it.
Satellite imagery shows how Israeli authorities have reduced the amount of land available inside the Gaza Strip. The destruction of agricultural land places further pressure on an already limited geographical area that is contaminated in many locations, undermining the possibility of preserving the foundations of life there in the future.
Alongside the destruction of agricultural land is a worsening waste crisis. With around 2,000 tonnes of waste generated each day, Gaza is increasingly resembling an open-air public health time bomb.
The destruction of infrastructure used to collect and process waste has caused enormous quantities of solid waste to accumulate across different parts of the Strip.
This presents serious risks to public health and the environment, including soil and water contamination, the spread of insects and rodents, emissions produced by decomposing or burning waste, and exposure of residents to hazardous substances.
These conditions pose a direct threat to the health of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza over the short, medium and long term.
“Futuricide is a dynamic of ecocide” that destroys not only the present, but also the conditions that allow a society to envisage and construct its future in every field.
When the blockade of Gaza comes to an end, it will be necessary to “detoxify the land”. This means removing bombs and ordnance, dealing with around 330,000 tonnes of household solid waste, as well as approximately 50 million tonnes of rubble and building debris.
In Lebanon, although currently available data do not allow the amount of asbestos contained in the rubble to be determined precisely, the possibility of its presence raises major environmental and health concerns, particularly during rubble removal, transport and processing.
Lebanon: The Slow Death of the Land
Israeli strikes on Lebanon have generated enormous quantities of rubble, particularly in the most heavily affected southern areas.
According to estimates from UN-Habitat, more than eight million tonnes of rubble have accumulated in the South and Nabatieh governorates. Other estimates from the American University of Beirut suggest the total could reach around 100 million tonnes.
Although currently available data do not allow the quantity of asbestos contained in this rubble to be precisely determined, the possibility of its presence raises significant environmental and health concerns, particularly during the removal, transportation and processing of debris.
Fires deliberately caused during the Israeli aggression, along with the use of munitions containing white phosphorus, have also caused extensive damage to soil and vegetation.
Based on remote sensing data and information from the World Food Programme, around 1,900 hectares of agricultural land and pasture have been burned, threatening food security and the livelihoods of local residents who depend on agriculture.
Legal Shortcomings
These shortcomings are closely linked to a Western legal and intellectual legacy that developed over centuries, from Hugo Grotius to Carl von Clausewitz, in which war was primarily understood as a struggle between political and military wills rather than as a long-term disruption of natural and ecological balances.
For a long period, this bias led environmental damage to be treated either as part of military strategy or as a secondary consequence of warfare, rather than as destruction with lasting consequences for both people and the environment.
The effects extend beyond immediate material losses. They destabilise food security, weaken environmental resilience, and push local populations deeper into cycles of poverty and dependency.
Because such damage often emerges slowly, is geographically dispersed and has sources that are difficult to identify, assessing the scale of environmental losses and determining responsibility becomes exceptionally complex.
This can weaken mechanisms of accountability and reinforce impunity for those responsible for causing environmental harm.
German sociologist Ulrich Beck explained in his analysis of the “risk society” that modern threats, whether industrial, environmental or military, often exceed society’s capacity to control them fully. They emerge as global risks that are frequently invisible and delayed in their appearance.
This form of slow environmental violence, characterised by its spread, accumulation and delayed effects, has an especially severe impact on the most vulnerable communities, particularly those already suffering from social, economic and institutional weakness.
Such communities find themselves on the front line of growing environmental injustice. They bear the burden of pollution, the degradation of natural resources and the cost of recovery, while legal and political responsibility for the damage remains unclear or unresolved.
The problem, therefore, lies not only in the absence of legal rules, but also in the gap between the true scale of environmental damage and the international legal system’s ability to detect it, prove it, assign responsibility and ensure that it is remedied.
German sociologist Ulrich Beck explained in his analysis of the “risk society” that contemporary threats, whether industrial, environmental or military, often exceed the capacity for complete control and impose themselves as global risks that are frequently invisible and delayed in appearing.
Slow Environmental Violence
The toxic and environmental consequences of conflicts often develop over long periods, with their health effects sometimes becoming visible only years later.
Although studies have linked exposure to certain pollutants with increased risks of chronic diseases and some forms of cancer, scientifically and legally proving causation and assigning responsibility remain extremely difficult.
Scientific uncertainty plays a central role here. It is not merely a lack of knowledge, but can become a factor shaping how environmental cases are managed and when preventive measures, remediation and compensation are implemented.
The work of Naomi Oreskes has shown how doubt and uncertainty can be exploited to delay recognition of harm or postpone necessary action.
The problem becomes even more complicated during war, when access to data is restricted, independent studies are difficult to conduct, and identifying sources of pollution and those responsible becomes far more challenging.
Uncertainty can therefore become a “legal vacuum in which political and economic interests intersect with the logic of avoiding responsibility, allowing slow environmental violence to continue and environmental justice to be postponed”.
International Law Lags Behind
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court recognises environmental crimes only when damage is “widespread, long-term and severe”, three cumulative conditions that make practical application extremely difficult.
Yet the view of the environment merely as a resource or a space subordinate to human activity has not existed across all legal and intellectual traditions. Comparison with classical Islamic thought reveals a different understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature.
In Lebanon and Gaza, reconstruction should not be limited to rebuilding buildings and infrastructure. It must also include decontamination, clearing unexploded ordnance, rehabilitating soil and water, restoring agricultural land and ecosystems, and incorporating environmental losses into compensation frameworks as an essential component of environmental justice and the protection of future generations.
In Islamic thought, the human being is viewed as a khalifah, or trustee, entrusted with responsibility for protecting nature. This understanding was reflected in mechanisms such as the hima system, in which certain areas were designated for protection, and in the recognition of water as a shared resource.
Modern discussions within the United Nations have also begun, albeit gradually, to address part of this legal gap, particularly through the Principles on Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts adopted in 2022.
Within this context, the concept of “ecocide” has begun to take shape as one of the most serious forms of widespread environmental destruction, accompanied by growing calls for an international legal framework capable of recognising such harm, criminalising severe acts of destruction and holding those responsible to account.
This raises the question of the “price of pain”. Pain has no true price, yet law has attempted since antiquity to assign compensable value to harm. From the concept of dolor in Roman law, through the Lex Aquilia, and later to the concept of diya in Islamic jurisprudence, the central question has remained: how can damage or suffering be compensated when money cannot restore what has been lost?
Today, that question takes on a new dimension when applied to environmental crimes.
The losses are no longer confined to human lives and property. They include the destruction of soil, contamination of water, loss of agricultural land and degradation of ecosystems, all of which can affect generations yet to come.
For this reason, precise mechanisms must be developed to assess material damage, property losses and environmental destruction, while international loss and damage mechanisms strengthened through climate negotiations, particularly since the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, should be activated alongside legal and financial mechanisms capable of compensating affected populations and rehabilitating damaged environments.
In Lebanon and Gaza, reconstruction should therefore extend far beyond rebuilding homes and infrastructure. It must include decontamination, the removal of unexploded ordnance, rehabilitation of soil and water, restoration of agricultural land and ecosystems, and the inclusion of environmental losses within compensation frameworks.
Such measures form an essential part of environmental justice and the protection of the rights of future generations.
This must be accompanied by the criminalisation of present and future acts of ecocide and their inclusion within the framework of international crimes.
