Weaponizing pollution: How Israel’s waste policies target Palestinians

The newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported on Saturday that, in the latest sign of the environmental dimensions of Israel’s colonial project, Israeli authorities plan to build a massive waste-incineration plant in Qalandiya, north of occupied Jerusalem — a project that goes far beyond waste management and has become a new tool in a wider set of policies aimed at suffocating Palestinian life.

Approved by the Israeli cabinet last May, the project is part of a larger plan envisioning the construction of five similar facilities in the coming years. According to the submitted maps, part of the separation wall will be moved — meaning a segment of the wall will be demolished and rebuilt closer to Jerusalem’s administrative borders.

Al-Araby Al-Jadeed states that this will result in the confiscation of roughly 150,000 square meters of Palestinian agricultural land and the demolition of two residential buildings that house dozens of people.

More disturbing still, the project will be funded by Israel’s “Cleanliness Fund,” which is nominally tied to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Despite its name, the fund’s budget is effectively being used to advance policies that destroy the Palestinian environment. The same fund will pay for demolishing and rebuilding the wall to reroute it in favor of a project that will severely damage the surrounding ecosystem.

Waste as a tool of Colonialism

To understand the scale of the problem, one must look at Israel’s long-standing policy of dumping its waste in the West Bank — a systematic approach that has for decades been used to destroy the Palestinian environment and pressure Palestinians into forced displacement.

This policy operates through two channels:

1. The official channel:

Licensed facilities process Israeli waste. Examples include:

·        Compost Or in the Jordan Valley, the largest wastewater-sludge treatment plant in the occupied territories, receiving more than 225,000 tons of waste annually from 25 settlements and Israeli facilities.

·        EMS factory in the Shilo industrial zone, which has a monopoly on processing electronic and metal waste.

·        Green Oil near Ariel, which burns around 5,000 tons of oily waste each year.

2. The unofficial channel:

Around 70 unregulated dumping sites scattered across the West Bank receive dozens of truckloads daily. Data shows that 90% of waste in these sites originates from Israeli areas; Palestinian waste barely reaches 10%. Much of the settlements’ waste — whether through official or unofficial channels — ends up dumped in Palestinian lands with no regard for environmental laws or the health and rights of local residents.

Even Israel’s own “Civil Administration” admits the crisis is severe: the number of trucks transporting Israeli industrial waste into the West Bank increased by 200% between 2016 and 2020 — an admission that reveals only the tip of the iceberg.

The waste dumped into the West Bank includes a full spectrum of hazardous materials: sewage sludge, electronic waste, chemical byproducts requiring specialized treatment, hospital waste, construction debris, household waste, and chemicals of unknown origin.

Organized networks designed to destroy the Palestinian environment

The waste-transfer system from Israel into the West Bank forms a complex, multi-layered network revealing a coordinated structure connecting government bodies with private companies — a system designed to shift environmental costs onto a population with no power to resist.

Sometimes this happens “officially,” through licensed companies transporting industrial and medical waste from Israeli cities and settlements to designated facilities in the West Bank. But the larger and more destructive portion happens in the shadows: unofficial dumping, carried out by networks in which factory owners directly hire drivers to dump waste at night in open Palestinian lands without oversight.

Local residents often have no warning and no ability to respond. Meanwhile, factories in settlements exploit Palestinian poverty by selling them second-hand electronic waste at extremely low prices, encouraging Palestinians to burn it to extract valuable metals — a practice that severely pollutes the air, poisons the soil, and causes serious diseases.

The most dangerous element of the system is the deliberate absence of oversight.

Truck drivers told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that aside from a superficial security check, no one inspects their cargo. Israeli institutions knowingly look the other way. Even Israel’s official State Comptroller reported that the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Transport have no monitoring system for vehicles carrying hazardous materials — dramatically increasing the risk of toxic leaks, environmental disasters, and major accidents.

The uncontrolled waste entering the West Bank includes the most dangerous types: infectious hospital waste, chemical-factory waste rich in heavy metals and toxins, and electronic waste containing radioactive or highly hazardous components.

Turning the environment into a battlefield

Israel’s environmental policies in the West Bank reveal a striking contradiction that exposes the inherently discriminatory nature of the colonial project.

While large areas of Palestinian land are effectively turned into dumping grounds, Israeli environmental bodies — such as the Nature and Parks Authority and the Society for the Protection of Nature — declare other Palestinian areas as “nature reserves,” prohibiting Palestinians from entering or using them.

Al-Araby Al-Jadeed notes that this duality shows how environmental laws and institutions have become tools of territorial control and territorial expansion: strict environmental protection in areas Israel wants to reserve for settlers, and complete suspension of environmental law in Palestinian areas turned into “sacrifice zones.”

Israel has created a dual legal system for environmental management: strict regulations inside Israel and even in settlements, but waste management in Palestinian areas is governed by “military orders,” effectively neutralizing all normal environmental protections.

This exceptional framework is clearly reflected in a joint plan by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Environment Minister Idit Silman, which seeks to address the “problem” of waste burning in 33 West Bank locations not through environmental policy but through military command — a stark indication that the Palestinian environment is officially managed outside the realm of civil law.