Environmental Warfare in Gaza. Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance

The perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip is formed by a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a 'buffer zone', is established along Gaza's 'borders', extending deep into Palestinian residential areas and farmlands— further compounding the Gaza Strip's isolation from the rest of Palestine.

Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian lands by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by unannounced aerial spraying of military herbicides, extending the reach of Israeli violence into the realm of chemical warfare. Today, the spraying has destroyed entire swaths of arable land in Gaza, forcibly changing a once-lush Palestinian landscape, and providing the Israeli army with better visibility to fire at Palestinian targets with lethal force from a distance.

This book is a vivid document of this latest stage of Israeli warfare, including original maps, images and visualisations which deepen our understanding of its environmental and human impact. It collects new documents, original archival materials, stills of drone footage, first-hand testimonies of farmers, organisers and protesters, and documents affected vegetation in Gaza as 'silent witnesses' to Israeli settler-colonial violence.

Foreword by Eyal Weizman
Introduction: Colonial Legacies of Farm Warfare
Chapter 1: Reconfiguration of Biopolitical Landscapes in Palestine
Chapter 2: The Disappearing Trees of Gaza 
Chapter 3: The Al-Shawwa Citrus Export Company
Chapter 4: Israeli Herbicidal Warfare as Colonial Practice
Conclusion: Sowing New Landscapes of Resistance
Acknowledgments
Tribute to a loved friend: Roshdi Yahya al-Sarraj (1992–2023)

Shourideh is the lead Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, linking our investigations to the work and research of civil society, grassroots groups and human rights defenders in the country. She is a scholar in political science and human rights and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. Shourideh has two decades of extensive academic, legal research, and fieldwork experience in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine/Israel, on the topics of human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power. She is Senior Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in NYC. Her publications include Stateless Citizenship: The Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013); Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018); Environmental Warfare in Gaza (Pluto Press, 2024); Constituting the Jewish State: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Exclusion (I.B. Tauris, 2025).