![]() Israel’s control of water resources in the West Bank has helped create a huge sanitation problem that poses an immediate and dire threat to Palestinians but also a threat to Israelis, as untreated sewage flows from Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea. In Gaza, where much of the electricity is supplied by Israel, power outages dragged on this summer as demand for air conditioning skyrocketed, creating dangerous conditions for people who need ventilators to breathe.Įcosystems aren’t beholden to borders the environmental harms wrought on one population by the powerful government next door can sometimes boomerang. Meanwhile, in portions of the West Bank, Palestinian farmers say that settler occupation and violence have blocked them from their regular water supply, forcing them to pay high prices for water as natural sources decline. While both Israel and Palestine are affected by sea level rise and the loss of coastal territory, the impact is especially severe on the Gaza Strip because it is one of the most densely populated places on earth, and Palestinians are not allowed to expand beyond the militarized borders. But this bloody conflict has only served to exacerbate the environmental tipping points. Simultaneously, precipitation in Middle Eastern and North African countries has declined by over 8 percent each decade since the 1980s.īoth Israelis and Palestinians would be struggling to adapt to these challenges even if there were peace. Temperatures in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East are rising almost twice as fast as the global average, an international group of scientists concluded last year they are expected to rise 0.81 degrees each decade through the end of the century. Israel and Palestine are located in one of the most climate-vulnerable areas in the world. Understanding how climate and this conflict are tied together is, for me and for many others, adding another layer of tragedy onto an already heartbreaking situation. But in the case of Israel and Palestine, the land that’s being fought over is changing in unmistakable ways-ways that are helping perpetuate a cycle of oppression and violence. Sometimes, when global disasters or conflicts happen, people will whip up an infographic pointing out the (occasionally tenuous) connections to climate change I generally roll my eyes when someone tries to shoehorn climate into an issue that’s not particularly relevant. I spent the past week glued to my phone, as I’m sure many of you did, scrolling through endless news and horrible videos of the violence in the Middle East. ![]()
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