Long before October 2023, Gaza’s people suffered international sanctions, a humiliating occupation, and periodic Israeli bombardments. Few could leave the enclave, even for medical care; the destruction of crucial infrastructure meant that clean water and electricity were intermittent; and thousands of men, women, and children were killed in periodic wars. Even peaceful protests were met with lethal gunfire. But Palestinians still managed to carve out livelihoods in Gaza, and sustain a rich community life. There were drama, music, and dance performances and beaches crowded with picnicking families. Fishermen, when not fired on or arrested by the Israeli navy, landed sardines, tuna, and other Mediterranean delicacies, and farmers continued an eight-thousand-year tradition of tending olive trees and raising sheep, goats, and chickens.

The war turned this world into some sixty million tons of rubble. Last summer, writes the architect and human rights investigator Eyal Weizman, the Strip was blanketed with “enormous dust clouds containing particles of the different materials that formed the building[s] and [their] environment—concrete, plaster, paint, glass, metal, sand, soil—some of which are synthetic and toxic.” The dust “covered everybody’s skin, eyes, mouths, nostrils, it was present in food and water, and also covered the entire ground like a new layer of topsoil.”¹

In the decades to come, an epidemic of cancer, lung disease, and brain damage caused by this fallout could come to rival in lethality the war’s bombs and bullets. Over the past year Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben-Gurion University, has been mapping major sources of contamination in Gaza by comparing satellite images from before and after the start of the war and combining that information with snapshots, drone footage, and reports from sources on the ground. With this information he is managing to reconstruct which buildings containing which toxins were blown up or burned when and near whom. Other groups, including Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, have also mapped the destruction in Gaza, but Garb’s analysis is starting to provide the most detailed modeling yet of its likely toxicological consequences.

The first paper drawn from this research will document asbestos contamination in two of what are likely to be many hotspots. Widely used as roofing in Gaza’s urban refugee camps and above the stairwells of apartment buildings, concrete containing asbestos is safe when intact, but when shattered it releases tiny fibers that are easily inhaled. Over decades they tear the lungs apart as the cells of the immune system futilely try to extract them, a process that frequently leads to emphysema and mesothelioma, an especially deadly form of lung cancer.

One place where asbestos was ubiquitous is the former site of the large, densely populated Jabalia refugee settlement, once home to 70,000 people before it was flattened completely in what even a former Israeli defense minister referred to as an act of ethnic cleansing. The demolished Jabalia site was occupied by displaced people for about a year, then largely evacuated in 2025. Now it is divided between depopulated Israeli-controlled territory and an area inhabited once again by displaced Palestinians.

The other hotspot Garb uses as a case study is the former site of Al Qarya as-Suwaydiya, or the Swedish Village, named for the international troops who helped rebuild the small, coastal Palestinian settlement there in the 1960s. Garb observes that the Swedish Village has housed dozens—perhaps cumulatively hundreds—of soldiers since the Israeli military began using the ruins and the few remaining buildings as an outpost in 2024. Each square yard of the village, he estimates, originally contained close to a pound of asbestos roofing, if spread evenly across it. But now that material has been shattered and pushed into the outpost’s protective rubble berms. The regular traffic of heavy military vehicles and repeated reworking of the land with bulldozers would have raised dust clouds full of suspended asbestos particles, no doubt inhaled by the drivers and soldiers downwind.

In other areas Garb has identified the blown-up remains of warehouses that once contained thousands of tons of dead lead-acid batteries, which Israeli restrictions long prevented Palestinians from exporting for safe disposal or recycling. Elsewhere he has detected black streaks on the ground, some more than half a mile long, indicating likely carcinogenic hydrocarbon contamination from industrial sites. The fallout could be similar to that produced by the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which caused elevated rates of nearly thirty diseases, including more than a dozen types of cancer, and killed more people than the attack itself.

To confirm Garb’s estimates, it would be necessary to test soil samples from the areas he has identified as particularly likely to be contaminated. But the Israeli government seems to be obstructing efforts to carry out such tests, let alone assist the current and future victims of this environmental catastrophe. Aid workers and others entering Gaza attend an official briefing where they are informed that it is forbidden to leave the enclave with even small amounts of soil or sand. Once in the Strip, any scientists surreptitiously collecting research material risk being spotted by overhead surveillance drones. At departure checkpoints every piece of luggage is emptied onto a conveyor belt, and border guards carefully inspect each item. Several people told me they knew researchers whose soil samples had been confiscated. Palestinian researchers in Gaza have no capacity to conduct such experiments on their own, since the enclave lost all twelve of its universities and scores of scientists in the bombing. Without the Israeli government’s cooperation, only remote assessment and modeling like Garb’s can even begin to determine the scale and location of toxic contamination in which Gaza’s population now lives.

Palestinian communities have long struggled with the threat and reality of toxic exposure. Garb became interested in this subject about fifteen years ago, by which time he’d spent decades working on environmental issues around the world. After the second intifada, Israel placed tighter restrictions on work permits for Palestinians, and unemployment in the West Bank rose steeply. People turned to informal occupations like street vending and handling the disposal of old computers and other electronic devices, most illegally trucked across the border from Israel while the authorities looked the other way. Teams of workers would burn the coating off the cables to isolate the copper wire inside, the price of which was soaring at the time. Within a decade some five tons of cables were being burned daily in the West Bank, generating more than a thousand jobs and adding $28 million to the economy. School-age children installed the London Metal Exchange app on their phones, Garb told me, so they could time sales for the best prices.

But the smoke from the burning cables—full of lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other deadly pollutants—endangered not only the recyclers but also residents of nearby villages. In downwind communities the first rains of the season were black with dust, threatening the villages’ drinking water. A farmer whose flock grazed near the burn sites said he’d lost half of his lambs to miscarriages; chickens laid eggs without yolks; and, Garb’s research showed, the rate of lymphoma in children was four times higher than in areas of the West Bank that weren’t near burn sites. In one village, Garb told me, two children in neighboring houses whose mothers were both in their first trimester during a serious nearby burn incident were born with identical birth defects: one of their legs failed to develop below the knee.

Palestinian villagers had been trying for years to persuade their own government and the Israeli authorities to pay attention to this crisis, but their protests and letters received no response. Then, in 2014, Garb secured funding from the Swedish International Development Agency to work with Palestinian community groups to map e-waste burn sites, develop a detailed plan to remediate the land, and persuade electronic waste collectors to use grinders instead of burning to extract the copper from cables—a more expensive but safer method.² By 2017 a pilot program had reduced the number of toxic burn sites by 80 percent; the following year Garb received funding from the US Agency for International Development, Washington’s erstwhile foreign aid body, to conduct further research.

Garb and his Palestinian partners wanted to scale up the pilot, but the donors required that the funds go through the Palestinian Authority’s environmental body in Ramallah, rather than to the local municipalities and communities that had begun dealing with the problem themselves. As Garb recounts in a book he coauthored on the area’s e-waste economy, the project would require driving the hazardous waste over the border into Israel for processing. The Palestinian environmental authority, however, insisted that Israel allow the PA to control the border, so that it could ensure the waste not come back. This Israel refused to do.³ The project has therefore slowed, and e-waste burning continues.

In the days after October 7, Garb saw at once that the toxic fallout in Gaza would be catastrophic, and he applied to USAID for funding to conduct an environmental assessment of the enclave. With Palestinian partners, including a hospital, he planned to carry out a modeling study of contamination hotspots, collect and analyze soil samples from those areas, interview Palestinians to identify further sites of likely contamination, and conduct lab analyses of samples of hair, nails, urine, and blood for signs of exposure. This information could have been used to identify the most dangerous areas, evacuate and treat people at risk, and guide plans to safely remediate the land.

After extensive review, USAID approved the grant in December 2024, pending some modest revisions, and the team began preparing the requested amendments. But then, in January, on the afternoon of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a State Department notice suspended all the agency’s programs. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that exemptions would be issued for “life-saving” humanitarian programs that align with US interests, but Garb’s efforts to convince USAID that his project merited such consideration were met with silence.

In the following months Garb, without money to support his team, continued working alone. As his findings emerged, he discussed them with just about anyone who would listen. In early 2026 he delivered a presentation at the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), the joint US–Israeli command and humanitarian coordination hub that has managed Gaza since the October cease-fire announcement.

In the giant hangar-like space that houses the CMCC, Garb told me, US and Israeli soldiers mingled with international humanitarian workers amid rows of computers and a vast screen showing an American TV news loop, drone images of the enclave, and the latest social media posts from Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The aid workers were trying to provide relief from the savagery alongside the people who had wrought it. But Garb assumed they would all have a common interest in where the contamination was—whether to help Palestinians find safe ground for their tents and avoid exposure while operating rubble-crushing machines, or to protect Israeli soldiers, bulldozer drivers, and others. Initially Garb wondered whether the IDF or US personnel had conducted internal soil testing surveys of their own. But when he spoke with the engineers whose job it was to know this information, they seemed unaware of any such studies. If he or someone else were permitted to collect samples from a few select areas, Garb told them, he could have lab results in ten days.

At first the officers most directly involved in protecting soldiers and civilian contractors seemed eager to follow up on his offer. “We’ve been chasing this information for months,” Garb says an American officer told him. Contact information was exchanged, and Garb told me that he tried to keep the conversation going with emails and messaging, but that it petered out when his contacts tried to mobilize their institutions.

Faced with this silence and the Israeli soil sampling restrictions, Garb considered more inventive methods. When he was working in the West Bank, he noticed that after a day of field work his trouser cuffs would be black with soot. The soil at some West Bank e-waste burn sites contained over 10,000 parts per million of lead, roughly twenty-five times the upper bound of what the US Environmental Protection Agency considers safe for children to play in, and a small, unsystematic survey of children living near the sites had found some with blood lead concentrations over three times the US Center for Disease Control’s level of concern. Garb suspected they’d been playing in contaminated areas, but also wondered if the recyclers’ clothes might be another route of exposure.

Garb’s daughter was then a toddler. Worried about what his clothes might do to her, he developed a system in which he removed them before entering his house and washed them separately, instructing his field team to do the same. But he wondered just how much lead they actually carried, so before putting them in the washing machine he rinsed them in a bucket of water, let the sludge sink to the bottom, drained off the water, dried the sludge, and then analyzed it with a portable X-ray spectrometer. While the amount of lead in sludge from dirty trousers that he hadn’t worn near burn sites was undetectably low, the sludge-lead concentration from trousers that had been to the burn sites ranged between 250 and 800 parts per million. This was far lower than the burn site soil, but still concerning because the dirt that ends up on trousers likely includes more of the smaller airborne lead particles that are easily breathed in.

Last winter a humanitarian worker who’d returned from visiting various sites inside Gaza contacted Garb to discuss toxic exposure in the Strip. Garb asked if he had done his laundry, and when the humanitarian worker replied that he hadn’t, Garb talked him through a version of the protocol for isolating the sludge from his clothes and transferring it to a sealed plastic test tube. I was also interested in what this experiment would reveal, and since the humanitarian worker was in the US, I helped Garb arrange to have the sample analyzed by an American toxicology lab, which found that it contained 36 parts per million of lead. This is similar to the levels Garb measured on tree leaves a hundred meters from one of the West Bank e-waste burn sites. The humanitarian worker was personally in little danger, but since he hadn’t visited any of Gaza’s likely epicenters of lead contamination, the fact that his clothes carried as much as they did just from everyday use illustrates how pervasive such contamination must be throughout the Strip.

Current conditions in Gaza suggest that toxic cleanup efforts will not be taking place any time soon. Since the October 2025 cease-fire announcement, most Palestinians have crowded into tent camps and the remains of buildings in the narrow, Hamas-controlled coastal area west of a much larger Israeli-occupied zone. In the Hamas-controlled area, the Israeli military continues to conduct almost daily attacks that have killed over one thousand people since the fighting was supposed to have paused. Meanwhile, Hamas is attempting to defend the area it still occupies by asserting control over the courts and security and imposing arbitrary taxes on trade.

Some parties, however, appear to have other plans for that particular piece of real estate. At the Davos World Economic Forum in January Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner presented a plan for transforming Gaza’s coast into a Riviera of high-rise pleasure palaces for the global elite. For months, Kushner and other Trump officials had been working on a scheme for the construction, in the area surrounding the Riviera, of eight “Alternative Safe Communities,” where carefully vetted Palestinians would be given homes, schools, medical clinics, and jobs, presumably in the Riviera and in yet-to-be-constructed adjacent industrial zones.

The plan has been much scaled down and is having trouble finding investors, but if any turn up they should be aware that most of the dead battery warehouses and other potentially toxic sites are in the area where some of the Alternative Safe Communities are to be built. According to The Atlantic, rubble clearance in these communities is to be carried out by Tetra Tech, an $8 billion California-based engineering firm. In 2017 two Tetra Tech employees were convicted of falsifying soil toxicology reports for a project to convert a San Francisco Navy yard into civilian homes; last year the company agreed to a settlement payout with federal authorities who accused it of misrepresenting samples and other violations in connection with the project.

Kushner’s vision seems to me like a timeworn strategy of urban renewal: make a historic and beautiful old neighborhood so dangerous that it’s officially condemned, move the displaced who had lived there for generations to potentially contaminated land, and then redevelop the area for the rich. The details of Kushner’s plan, I’m told, are pretty half-baked; still, Trump’s Board of Peace, on which Kushner sits, recently announced the imminent creation of “Hamas-free humanitarian zones” to which Palestinians are to be moved. It’s not clear how this will happen, but the first Hamas-free humanitarian zone will be at Tel Sultan, a few kilometers from the Swedish Village. 

Meanwhile Garb continues to try to make visible the toxic effects of the war. By looking at sequential satellite images, he recently began noticing new activity in the Swedish Village. In late May heavy earth-moving vehicles began extensive work for the first time since the area was demolished in 2024. Because this is one of the areas he mentioned on his CMCC visit as needing urgent attention, he wondered at first if his warnings might have been heeded after all. Was the Israeli military belatedly taking steps to remediate the area, if only to protect its own soldiers? Or was this the groundwork for a new development? 

Over the following month, Garb watched as the few remaining buildings that had housed the military outpost were flattened and a hectare or so of the land once occupied by the village was graded, squared, and compacted into a leveled pad and three-sided berm that is very likely to be the foundation for a more permanent military base. Unless the equipment operators who did this work, and the soldiers stationed downwind while it was going on, were equipped with the kind of extreme hazmat protective gear never seen in the course of this war, they would no doubt have been exposed to tremendous amounts of asbestos-laden dust. Now it was clear. This was a matter not of remediating toxicity but of remaining blind to it.