Islam Elhabil The Electronic Intifada 22 October 2026
At the end of August 2026, Israel faced an unusual crisis affecting one of the most important pillars of its water security. A dense algal bloom and exceptionally high turbidity in the Mediterranean Sea forced the shutdown or reduced operation of five of the country’s six major desalination plants.
During the crisis, Israeli authorities increased pumping from groundwater and the Sea of Galilee to compensate for reduced desalinated water production and in order to maintain supplies.
The significance of the crisis is even greater given Israel’s heavy dependence on desalination, which supplies up to 80 percent of its drinking water. Disruption at these plants therefore affected one of the strategic assets of Israel’s water system.
This crisis was not separate from the environmental changes that have unfolded along the eastern Mediterranean coast over the past three years. While Israeli desalination plants were dealing with unprecedented algal growth and turbidity, Gaza’s wastewater system had already lost most of its capacity to collect and treat sewage.
An April 2026 report by Doctors Without Borders, drawing on data from the United Nations, the European Union and the World Bank, stated that nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed by the Israeli military, including desalination facilities, wells, water networks and wastewater systems.
The latest UN data illustrate the scale of the collapse. In a September 2026 report, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) detailed that all six wastewater treatment plants in Gaza were out of service and that around 70 percent of sewage pumping stations were no longer operating. As a result, more than 150,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater were being discharged into the environment each day, increasing risks to water quality and public health.
This wastewater accumulates in affected areas, seeps into the surrounding environment and, in part, reaches the Mediterranean Sea.
Where does wastewater go when treatment plants stop working?
When a coastal city loses its ability to treat wastewater, the sewage does not disappear, the problem simply shifts from the treatment facility to the surrounding environment. In Gaza, part of the wastewater flows not only into the sea, but another part infiltrates the soil and groundwater, while open sewage accumulates in devastated areas and displacement sites.
According to engineer Omar Shatat, deputy executive director of Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, as quoted by The Guardian in September 2026, around 45,000 cubic meters of untreated wastewater reach the Mediterranean every day, while an additional 15,000 cubic meters seep into groundwater through cesspits, particularly in densely populated displacement areas.
Untreated sewage carries high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, two of the main nutrients that promote algal growth in coastal waters. The Israeli environmental organization Zalul, along with desalination experts, has warned that wastewater discharged from Gaza can increase nutrient loading in the sea and contribute to more severe algal blooms along the coast.
Satellite observations and several Israeli assessments suggest that the bloom developed farther south, around Egypt’s Nile Delta and northern Sinai, before moving northward along the coast with marine currents.
The limited environmental monitoring available from Gaza makes its precise contribution difficult to quantify. However, Gaza’s proximity to this coastal pathway, together with the large discharge of untreated wastewater following the destruction of its sewage infrastructure, leaves open the possibility that nutrient pollution from Gaza intensified the bloom as it moved north.
The director general of Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research also said the algae appeared to have come from the Nile Delta.
Some scientists argue that untreated sewage from Gaza may have added nitrogen and phosphorus that intensified the bloom. However, professor and marine ecologist Tamar Guy-Haim considers Gaza sewage unlikely to have been the main cause, noting that desalination facilities near El Arish in northern Sinai, south of Gaza, were also disrupted by unusually turbid seawater.
The evidence therefore suggests a multi-factor event: the bloom likely developed farther south, while pollution from Gaza may have increased its severity.
International scientific guidance similarly shows that algal blooms are driven by multiple interacting factors, including nutrient availability, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as water temperature, sunlight, currents and mixing conditions.
The Guardian report suggests that untreated wastewater from Gaza may have supplied additional nutrients that intensified the bloom. Due to algae in the northern Sinai, there is no evidence that Gaza’s coast was the original cause.
This is consistent with the known role of untreated sewage as a nutrient-rich source that can promote microalgal growth. The distinction is important: the collapse of Gaza’s wastewater system may have added a substantial nutrient load to a connected marine environment through which the bloom was already moving.
The importance of this Mediterranean episode lies in Israel’s heavy dependence on seawater desalination. During normal conditions, desalination supplies approximately 80 percent of drinking-water demand in Israel, making the quality of raw seawater a direct factor in the stability of the water-supply system.
This is where the main environmental contradiction becomes clear. Destroying wastewater treatment infrastructure in Gaza does not mean that the consequences remain inside Gaza.
The Mediterranean off Gaza and Israel is one connected marine system in which water, algae, organic matter and nutrients move according to currents, winds and seasonal conditions, not political boundaries. Continued discharge of untreated wastewater from Gaza therefore creates not only public health and environmental threats for Palestinians, but also additional pressure on the coastal system on which Israeli desalination facilities depend.
Israeli environmental experts have warned directly that continued coastal pollution can increase risks to water-production infrastructure in Israel.
The apparent lack of concern may be driven less by ignorance than by political priorities and the fact that environmental damage often appears slowly. Military actions produce immediate results, while pollution of soil, groundwater and air can take time to develop and is harder to measure.
This is made worse by limits on environmental monitoring.
Researchers leaving Gaza have been prohibited by Israeli officials from carrying out even small soil samples for further investigation. Some collected samples have been confiscated.
As a result, much of the pollution can only be assessed through remote sensing and modeling rather than laboratory testing. In this sense, environmental harm is not only treated as a lower priority, but efforts to fully measure its scale are also restricted.
Underground: a geographically connected aquifer
The cross-boundary connection is not limited to the sea. Groundwater beneath Gaza forms part of the regional Coastal Aquifer extending along the southeastern Mediterranean.
World Bank documents describe Gaza’s groundwater system as an extension of the coastal aquifer beneath Israel, composed largely of sand, sandstone and gravel, while the wider system stretches from the Mount Carmel area in the north through Gaza and into northern Sinai.
Even before the current war, Gaza’s section of the aquifer was already suffering from over-extraction, seawater intrusion and declining water quality. Untreated wastewater was also a recognized source of the contamination.
World Bank assessments have documented how inadequate wastewater management historically contributed to pollutant infiltration into the aquifer, while groundwater abstraction above natural recharge rates lowered water levels and increased seawater intrusion. The war has added new pressures through the daily discharge of untreated wastewater onto land and into the sea, increasing risks to soil and groundwater alongside contamination from debris, hazardous materials and munitions.
The geological continuity of the aquifer does not mean that pollutants leaking at one point in Gaza will necessarily reach a well inside Israel. Groundwater contaminant transport depends on the direction of flow, pumping rates, geological properties and travel time.
Yet the shared geology of the Coastal Aquifer still makes groundwater management a regional issue, even if the dominant flow direction toward the Mediterranean means that direct contaminant movement from Gaza into Israeli groundwater is likely to be limited.
Other sources of pollution
Beyond water, the war has left behind an enormous mass of debris that has become a long-term environmental source of risk. Gaza’s rubble is not made up of concrete and stone alone.
The 2026 Gaza Strip Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment estimated that more than 68 million metric tonnes of debris are, in part, mixed with medical and infectious waste, untreated sewage, fuel, hazardous substances and explosive ordnance.
As these materials decompose or are exposed to rain, contaminated leachate can move into surrounding soils and potentially seep toward groundwater, creating long-term risks beyond the debris itself. This also raises concerns for future agriculture in affected areas, although systematic soil testing is still needed to determine where contamination has reached levels that could make cultivation unsafe.
Periods in which official landfills became inaccessible also led to the expansion of uncontrolled dumping and open burning at more than 200 temporary sites, some of which also received medical waste after treatment facilities were destroyed by Israel. These materials do not necessarily remain where they were deposited.
Fine particles generated by building collapse or debris handling can enter the air, while rainfall can carry soluble contaminants into soil and groundwater.
What happened to the air above Gaza?
A 2025 study using Sentinel-5P satellite data, along with statistical analysis and machine-learning techniques, found clear increases in carbon monoxide, the ultraviolet aerosol index, sulfur dioxide and methane over Gaza after the war began. The researcher linked these changes to combustion, infrastructure destruction and the collapse of waste and wastewater management systems.
Although the study did not track the movement of these pollutants into Israel, an earlier study on air pollution transport in southern and central Israel demonstrated that air masses and pollutants move from the coast inland, and documented cases in which the Bir al-Saba area was affected by emissions originating from the Gaza Strip.
Given the close geographical proximity, Israeli territory is among the first areas that could be affected by cross-boundary pollution when meteorological conditions carry pollutants eastward or southeastward. This should prompt Israel to investigate the chemical signature of dust and gases generated by the war, as evidence grows that the environmental damage caused in Gaza is not confined to Gaza’s boundaries.
When pollution returns to its source
The war shows that the environmental destruction of Gaza cannot be contained within the Strip’s boundaries. The sea, groundwater and atmosphere are interconnected systems, and untreated sewage, pollutants, debris and emissions introduced into them can move beyond Gaza and place additional pressure on the wider region, including Israel because of its geographic proximity and environmental interdependence.
For Palestinians, however, these consequences are already immediate and far more severe. Alongside urgent humanitarian needs, the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority has developed an environmental relief and early recovery plan for Gaza, while the Palestinian Water Authority has begun efforts to restore the Sheikh Ajleen wastewater treatment plant as part of early recovery.
In addition, the United Nations Environment Program has called for systematic soil testing, reconstruction of water and sewage infrastructure, safe debris removal, and management of asbestos, heavy metals and other hazardous materials, problems whose effects could persist for years or even decades.
Environmental interdependence also raises questions for Israel. Israel cannot separate its own environmental security from the destruction caused in Gaza.
Disabling wastewater plants, degrading the coastline and destroying waste-management systems will not produce an isolated Palestinian environmental crisis. They create sources of pollution capable of reaching the Israeli environment.
Political boundaries may separate populations, but they cannot prevent water and air pollutants from carrying the consequences of environmental destruction across them.
Islam Elhabil is an environmental engineer from Gaza, with a PhD in chemical and process engineering. Based in Malaysia, she specializes in microplastics and wastewater treatment.