Israeli Aircraft Spray Herbicide over Gaza Farms to Harm Palestinian Crops

The frequency of the spray is determined by the direction of the wind, eyewitnesses say, adding that the spray stops when it rains, or when the wind blows “in the opposite direction”.

“They only start spraying along the border fence when the wind blows west, in the direction of the Palestinian lands, in order to allow the herbicides to cover a larger area inside our lands,” Palestinian farmer Youssef Abu Maghadid told Middle East Eye on Thursday.

“But when the wind starts blowing east, they immediately stop because it would harm them.”

In Gaza, around 40,000 Palestinians depend on farming as their only source of livelihood.

Israeli aircraft spraying herbicide beside the buffer zone along the Gaza strip is directly affecting the livelihoods of Palestinians in violation of international standards, a new report says, according to Guardian.

The study tracked the drift of the herbicides on to the Gazan side and concluded it was killing agricultural crops and causing “unpredictable and uncontrollable damage”, according to the report’s main researcher.

The report also concluded the spray is reaching more than 300 metres (980ft) into Gaza.

The work was undertaken by Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which spent 16 months investigating the potential effects of the spraying.

The report’s lead researcher said that in the last five years Israeli planes have sprayed herbicide more than 30 times on the Israeli side of the buffer zone with Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas.

Farmers living and working in these areas, however, have long claimed that their crops and livelihoods suffer as a result.

Using a video taken by Gisha, a Tel Aviv-based freedom of movement NGO, Forensic Architecture reconstructed the drift of the herbicide from a plane with the help of a fluid dynamics expert.

It also analysed leaf samples, interviewed farmers and used satellite imagery to map the effects of the spraying.

It says harmful concentrations of the spray that surpass EU standards landed in areas where farmers had recorded damage in the past.

“If you generalise this single spraying event in Khan Yunis on April 5th [2017] to the rest of the border you see something very similar,” said the researcher, who requested anonymity to protect their access.

“You see that there’s a protracted and continuous loss of greenness along the border that has over time flattened it and that isn’t recovering. It’s a piece of land that through bombings and the bulldozings and twice-a-year herbicidal spraying is becoming a barren and scorched dead zone.”

The Forensic Architecture report provides further confirmation that the herbicide spraying has caused “unpredictable and uncontrollable damage” on the Gaza side, according to their researcher.

“What was so significant from the Forensic Architecture [report] was that they show that the main effect of the spraying is inside of Gaza,” said Muna Haddad, an advocate with Gisha.

The Israeli army regularly claims that the herbicides are used to clear vegetation in the buffer zone on the Gaza side of the fence in order to have a clearer view of the area for military purposes.

But Palestinians say the policy inflicts wide-ranging damage on the residents of Gaza. Locals accused the Israeli authorities of intentionally damaging Palestinian crops in the eastern farmlands using various tactics over the years.

Aside from the spraying of herbicides, Palestinian farmers also have to deal with the constant firing of tear gas by Israeli forces deployed along the border fence in eastern Gaza.

“Since 2014, the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israel military close to the eastern border of Gaza has been complemented by the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides,” the research group Forensic Architecture found in 2019.

The London-based agency spent over a year examining the environmental and legal implications of the Israeli practice of aerial spraying of herbicides along the Gaza border.

“This ongoing practice has not only destroyed entire swaths of formerly arable land along the border fence, but also crops and farmlands hundreds of metres deep into Palestinian territory, resulting in the loss of livelihoods for Gazan farmers,” the agency said in a statement.

The situation worsened when Israel attacked Gaza in May 2021, leading to an estimated loss of $204m in Gaza’s agricultural sector, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture.