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Israeli environmental experts have called on the defense establishment to carefully weigh the long-term environmental implications of reported plans to flood the immense network of tunnels in the Gaza Strip with seawater to flush the Hamas militants out.
Quoting U.S. officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Israeli army last month set up five large water pumps near the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, which are capable of flooding the tunnels within weeks by pumping thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into them.
Under normal circumstances, rain falls to earth and percolates down into subterranean storage areas, or aquifers. This groundwater is pumped up into wells to supply drinking water.
Gaza is home to more than two million people and is one of the most densely populated places on earth. The enclave’s only sweet-water supply comes from a shallow aquifer running parallel to the Mediterranean coast.
That has been so overpumped and the subterranean water levels have dropped so far that seawater has entered the aquifer and mixed with the little sweet-water that remains.
The aquifer’s water quality has been further eroded by sewage, and agricultural chemical runoff, to the extent that 97 percent of Gaza’s freshwater no longer meets World Health Organization (WHO) water quality standards.
Even before the war, most Gazans relied on private water tankers and the yield of small desalination plants for drinking water.
Following Hamas’ storming of south Israel on October 7, Israel turned off three pipelines carrying drinking water into the strip. Under U.S. pressure, it subsequently reopened two of them, and during the recent pause in fighting to release hostages, allowed in more of the fuel needed to pump the water from the Israel-Gaza border into the enclave.
Prof. (Emer.) Eilon Adar of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in southern Israel, said that further potential ecological damage to Gaza’s aquifer by flooding the tunnels would depend on the quantity of water and the reach.
Stressing that he was neither an expert on the issue nor involved with the Defense Ministry’s reported plans, he said that the pumping of a relatively small amount of seawater affecting the area between the Mediterranean coastline and the point where sea- and sweet-water were mixing anyway would have minimal consequences.
That latter point lies anywhere from tens to several hundreds of meters inland from the Gazan shore.
But if several million cubic meters were pumped into the tunnels, and seeped into the aquifer, “the negative impact on groundwater quality would last for several generations, depending on the amount that infiltrates into the subsurface,” he said.
Israel would hardly feel the effect, he went on, because the coastal aquifer’s water flows from Israel to Gaza.
Nevertheless, Adar added, he would “hesitate about destroying a massive natural resource.”
“As a citizen, despite the disaster that we experienced on October 7, I still think that in the long run — and we have to think of the future — it would be politically and morally incorrect to have a thirsty neighbor,” he said.
Another water expert, who asked not to be named, said tunnels, carved out of porous sand, would need to be flooded several times.
Some of them were built to bring militants into Israel, he added. If seawater entered those sections, it could salinate Israeli wells close to the Gaza border.
Prof. Hadas Mamane, who heads the Environmental Engineering Program at Tel Aviv University, said the environmental impacts of all options for destroying the tunnels had to be considered, and their effects on the air, water, soil, hydrology and ecology tested in advance.
Blowing up weaponry in the tunnels could also have environmental consequences, she added, if dangerous toxic materials and heavy metals seeped into the groundwater.
“You don’t look at what’s best but what’s the least worst solution,” she said.
The officials cited by The Wall Street Journal said Israel had alerted the U.S. about the plan last month, but had not yet decided on whether to implement it.
The report said opinions in the Biden administration about the idea were mixed.
It also noted it was unclear whether the Israeli would move to flood the tunnels before all of the hostages that Hamas and other Palestinian groups abducted during the October 7 onslaught were freed, due to the apparent risk that would be posed to hostages being held underground.
Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi confirmed the Wall Street Journal report about flooding the tunnels, calling it “a good idea.”
“We are seeing a lot of underground infrastructure in Gaza, we knew there would be a lot. Part of the goal is to destroy this infrastructure,” Halevi said in response to a question at a press conference.
“We have various ways (to deal with the tunnels), I won’t talk about specifics, but they include explosives to destroy, and other means to prevent Hamas operatives from using the tunnels to harm our soldiers,” he said.
Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi appeared to confirm on Tuesday a report that Israel aims to flood Hamas’s tunnel network in the Gaza Strip, calling it “a good idea.”
“We are seeing a lot of underground infrastructure in Gaza, we knew there would be a lot. Part of the goal is to destroy this infrastructure,” Halevi said in response to a question at a press conference, regarding a report in The Wall Street Journal.
“We have various ways [to deal with the tunnels], I won’t talk about specifics, but they include explosives to destroy, and other means to prevent Hamas operatives from using the tunnels to harm our soldiers,” he said.
“Therefore, any means which give us an advantage over the enemy that deprives it of this asset, is a means that we are evaluating using. This is a good idea, but I won’t comment on its specifics,” Halevi added.
SourceNaharnet