Khan Yunis in Gaza
At its core, war is the competition of capital by other means. It is the savage fight of capital over the redistribution of the wealth produced through the exploitation of the global working class. The capitalist hyenas and their ruling governments fight to increase their share of the spoils, which come from the power and ownership of capital and the profits created by us workers. The capitalists and their politicians in official forums and parliaments haggle over the distribution of the general surplus produced by workers. This same process unfolds between the social capital of each nation on an international scale, in conferences and negotiations with other countries on a daily basis. The capitalists and capitalist states pursue this competition with ever more collective slaughter and more terrifying methods.
We have already discussed the destruction of the environment by commodities, the production process, and the governance of capitalist society. It is now time to examine another dimension of this decayed, outdated, and destructive system. The imperialist and devastating wars of the first and second world wars (with around 50 million dead, and the use of atomic weapons in Nagasaki and Hiroshima), as well as the wars in Korea (4.5 to 7 million dead), Congo (one of the longest wars with nearly 4 million dead), Rwanda, Palestine, and Vietnam (with 3 million dead), the war between the Iranian and Iraqi regimes (with approximately 1.5 million dead and 2 to 3 million injured), the First Gulf War, the massive U.S. military invasion in 2003, and the escalating use of weapons of mass destruction in these wars, have bred both human and environmental disasters. These wars have provided new experiences for the advancement of capitalist plunder. In addition, there have been hundreds of smaller and regional wars.
In the wars in Syria and Libya, which have now dragged on for more than a decade with no end in sight, horrifying weapons have been used, some of which remain shrouded in mystery. During the extensive bombing of Iraq, in addition to the massive use of conventional weapons and bombs, depleted uranium (DU) and white phosphorus were used extensively as weapons of mass destruction. These weapons have detrimental effects not only on civilians but also on the environment. The amount of these weapons used during the First Gulf War was around 340 tons. One of the most graphic depictions of the environmental costs of war was when 700 of Kuwait’s oil fields were set ablaze during the first Gulf War leaking an astounding 11 million barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf and creating a smoke plume stretching 800 kilometers. Nearly 300 oil lakes developed inland on the desert’s surface, contaminating the soils for many years.
However, during the U.S. invasion in 2003, the quantity increased nearly fivefold. The use of these weapons severely polluted Iraq’s water, soil, and air, with the consequences of DU contamination persisting in some areas. By 2004, one year after the invasion, Iraq had the highest rate of leukemia in the world. During the battle for Fallujah in November 2004, the U.S. military used white phosphorus bombs against armed opponents who had seized control of the city. Other Iraqi cities, such as Amara, Baghdad, Basra, and Karbala, were not spared from this scourge and were contaminated by radioactive materials. The level of radiation in Fallujah, for example, has been described as “worse than what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The city continues to be referred to as the “second Chernobyl.” A 2018 investigation by Al-Arabi revealed that Iraq recorded the highest rate of congenital abnormalities in the world during the past decade. The anomaly rate in Fallujah was worse than Iraq’s average, where U.S. coalition forces had used DU and white phosphorus. According to the Iraqi government, in 2005, the incidence of cancer due to DU munitions rose from 40 to 1,600 cases per 100,000 citizens. The U.S. military, which initially denied the use of these weapons, later admitted to it. According to a 2010 academic study, the incidence of cancer in Fallujah increased fourfold. Among Iraqi children under fourteen, the incidence increased twelvefold. Infant mortality in the city was four times higher than in neighboring Jordan. In 2014, the Dutch peace group Pax revealed that American jets and tanks had fired nearly ten thousand DU rounds in Iraq, many of which were used in or near populated areas. In addition to DU and white phosphorus, other substances such as perchlorates found in missiles and various other chemicals released by the use of weapons or the movement of military equipment like jets, tanks, and trucks have also contributed to Iraq’s environmental contamination. According to statistics released in 2008, the U.S. military consumed 1.2 million barrels of oil per month in Iraq, amounting to roughly 14 million barrels per year. The consumption of such a vast quantity of gasoline, diesel, and other fuels by the U.S. military significantly increased air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions in Iraq’s environment. The burning of the Al-Mishraq sulfur production facility, 30 kilometers from Mosul, released a massive amount of toxic gases, polluting the skies over Iraq and many other Middle Eastern countries for an extended period. This factory produced approximately 1.2 million tons of chemical products annually. According to a 2003 report by the United Nations, more than forty percent of trees within a 100-kilometer radius of this chemical plant were damaged or destroyed. Other industrial and military centers that caused widespread environmental pollution include the Al-Qa’qaa ammunition factory, 30 kilometers south of Baghdad, the Al-Tuwaitha nuclear research center, and the Al-Dawra petrochemical storage facilities. These facilities, which were among the largest sites for storing chemicals and petrochemicals in Iraq, were looted and attacked during the war and subsequently burned. These fires released over five thousand tons of highly toxic substances into the environment.
Even after the U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq, a significant amount of pollution and waste remained in the country. A 2010 report by the British newspaper *The Times* revealed that the U.S. military left behind a severely contaminated country upon its departure. Toxic waste, from oil and gasoline barrels to sulfuric acid, used car batteries, and scrap metal, littered Iraq’s war-torn environment in large quantities. According to Pentagon guidelines, this waste was supposed to be removed from Iraq and safely destroyed in the U.S., but the reality on the ground told a different story. Another report published by *The New York Times* in June 2010 emphasized the widespread contamination of Iraq’s waters and rivers. The Shatt al-Arab (Arvand Rud), formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and flowing into the Persian Gulf, had become a major environmental issue for Iraq. Repeated droughts worsened the situation, as seawater advanced into the river, raising salinity to uncontrollable levels and severely damaging surrounding lands and the river basin. The dam construction by neighboring countries on rivers that feed into the Tigris and Euphrates also played a significant role in this. According to Iraqi government statistics, one in four Iraqis still lacks access to safe and clean drinking water. In some cities and villages in Iraq, water is still being delivered by tanker trucks. The new era of devastating capitalist wars, with environmental dimensions and the emergence of known and unknown diseases, has just begun. The wars in Syria and the continued conflict in Iraq, with new dimensions and factors such as the various groups created by regional capitalist states and imperialist powers, will add other environmental issues to capitalism’s environmental crises.
As the world marks the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war, Western capitalist governments have sought to downplay the devastating effects of depleted uranium on the civilian population of this devastated country. The reason for this can be found in the disaster unfolding in Europe (Ukraine). The governments involved in this war, including the 30 NATO member states and Russia, are creating another catastrophe. On March 22, 2023, the British Ministry of Defense dismissed Russian criticism of the delivery of depleted uranium ammunition by the U.K. to Ukraine. A day earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had warned that if Britain delivered depleted uranium shells to Ukraine, Russia would “be forced to react.” The U.K. confirmed that anti-tank shells containing depleted uranium would be sent to Kyiv alongside Challenger 2 tanks. Russian government officials condemned the move, asking why London had decided to supply weapons that NATO had previously used in Yugoslavia. On Friday, July 7, 2023, Joe Biden, after calling his decision “very difficult,” confirmed that the U.S. would provide cluster bombs to Ukraine. According to international monitors (September 6, 2023), more than 300 people were killed, and over 600 injured in Ukraine in 2022 due to Russian forces’ use of cluster bombs, marking the first time in over a decade that Ukraine surpassed Syria in cluster bomb casualties. Russia’s widespread use of cluster bombs, which release multiple smaller bombs or munitions in the air, made 2022 the deadliest year for cluster bomb victims. On September 2, 2023, Reuters revealed that the Biden administration would send depleted uranium anti-tank ammunition to Ukraine for the first time. On September 2, 2023, the International Atomic Energy Agency gave the green light for the use of depleted uranium in war: “The UN’s nuclear watchdog stated that, after conducting studies in the former Yugoslavia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Lebanon, it concluded that ‘the presence of depleted uranium remnants scattered in the environment does not cause radioactive contamination or other risks for the region’s inhabitants’.”!!
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is once again exposing the lethal. According to a preliminary assessment published by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the environmental impact of this genocide in Gaza is unprecedented, exposing the community to rapidly growing soil, water and air pollution and risks of irreversible damage to its natural ecosystems. The West’s support for Israel’s genocide and the failure of the international community to bring an end to this catastrophic war has once again highlighted their damning hypocrisy on the climate crisis. On one hand, they keep prattling about the perils of the climate breakdown, yet they fail to acknowledge the mounting the growing concern of the masses about the long-term effects of Israel’s war and occupation. But it’s not just the carbon footprint of the war that is staggering. Reconstructing Gaza will come at a bigger environmental price. It has been estimated that Gaza’s reconstruction will generate nearly 60m tonnes of CO2. The emissions associated with rebuilding Gaza are projected to be higher than the annual emissions of over 135 countries.
The Palestinian people have long been the victims of war and occupation, but they are also in a region that is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The Gaza strip, the West bank and the areas surrounding it are predominantly hot areas with a large part of the territory arid or semi-arid. And with climate change, the rise in temperatures and lack of water are becoming more extreme. The effects of climate change, such as water scarcity, food insecurity, and extreme weather events, are further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and threatening the well-being of its remaining population. The war in Gaza is just a glimpse of the larger military boot print of wars and the military industrial complex. Military emissions are at an all-time high and recent data reveals that global CO2 emissions were 182 times higher than the beginning of industrial capitalism in 1850. During the bombing, Israeli airstrikes damaged or destroyed Palestinian refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and other civilian infrastructure. By late April 2024 it was estimated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. Scale of Destruction Over 150,000 homes have been destroyed and extensive damage has occurred to the electricity networks and educational institutions in Gaza. The bombings have resulted in a tragic loss of life, with reports indicating thousands of casualties, including many thousand children. The United Nations is investigating the environmental impact of the war in Gaza, which has caused a catastrophic spike in land, soil and water pollution environmental concerns pale beside such suffering. But they are also inseparable from the unfolding humanitarian disaster. Water pollution from the bombardments, for example, means a dearth in safe drinking water and a rise in water-borne diseases. Since the escalation of the war in October, waste management facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and power has been cut or interrupted. UNEP estimates that at least 100,000 cubic metres of sewage and wastewater are being dumped daily onto land or into the Mediterranean Sea.
This is despite all the evidence and figures presented above, which point to the accumulation of these such materials in human societies, farms, fields, and pastures, causing cancer and other severe consequences for living beings and humans. What we are witnessing in terms of environmental destruction, and what we will surely see more of, is the inevitable fate of this mode of production. The fate of us workers, our children, and their future is determined by capital and its accumulation, which it spreads throughout the world through its governments and military forces. As long as the working class does not form labor councils and unite its forces across borders against the rulers and capital, poverty, war, and environmental disasters will continue. Only the struggle to abolish capital and capitalist exploitation can save us from this monstrosity and devastation.
The class struggle against this system requires the establishment of a movement that has all the necessary capacity to disintegrate, collapse, crush and finally destroy the economic, political, legal, civil, cultural, moral and social forces of capital. A union and anti-capitalist movement that makes all forms of workers’ protests into active areas of the anti-wage slavery struggle. Struggle to improve livelihood, anti-dictatorship, fight against gender, ethnic and racial discrimination, anti-environmental pollution movement, make all of these as anti-capitalist and line up against the foundation of capital’s existence. In the first step, demand a complete withdrawal of food, clothing, housing, water, electricity and gas, household appliances, medicine, treatment, education or any other necessities of life from the control of the commodity trade and money of capitalism.
Workers Against Capitalism
The environmental impacts of conflict
July 25, 2025
Often overlooked as a dimension of the health effects of war, the impacts of conflict on the environment are gaining increasing attention. Rebecca Sers reports.
Armed conflicts pose unprecedented challenges for public health. Inevitably, much of the focus in these contexts falls on acute health needs. But modern warfighting causes conflict pollution and environmental harm leading to potentially important, more chronic, health risks. Doug Weir of the Conflict and Environmental Observatory told The Lancet that while “there is more awareness of this environmental damage, most of that is about the immediate impacts of the things that are burning, the things that are exploding, and the things that are destroyed. Less consideration is given to the consequences for environmental governance which can last decades potentially, and the almost inevitable public health legacies.” As the number of countries and people affected by conflict continues to rise—according to the 2025 Global Peace Index there are currently more conflicts globally than at any time since World War Two—the importance of documenting what Richard Sullivan has termed “covert threats to health” will only grow.
Conflict pollution can affect health by contaminating the environment—water, soil, and air resources and ecosystems—with heavy metals and chemicals. These toxic remnants of war are both a direct result of combat activities and a reverberating consequence of the disruption to state institutions, infrastructure, and services. Conflict debris is one of the most ubiquitous effects. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) told The Lancet that in Gaza, military activities have generated 53 million tonnes of conflict debris from damaged buildings and infrastructure. The contamination risk is most significant “at a localised level— such as industrial sites or older buildings containing hazardous materials like asbestos”. Debris often contains unexploded ordnance and human remains. “Asbestos primarily poses serious long-term health risks—such as asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma—through chronic exposure. It may take a generation for the full impacts to become visible. Heavy metals can cause acute poisoning at high doses and long-term damage to the nervous system and kidneys and may also increase cancer risk.”
No conflict has the same environmental footprint. As Syria emerges from 14 years of war, Wim Zwijnenburg, Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader for Dutch non-governmental organisation PAX, told The Lancet that the “ripple effects of conflict-driven pollution and large-scale environmental degradation are already causing health impacts in localised pollution hotspots”. In June, 2025, PAX outlined how intense fighting—cities bombed to rubble, nature reserves razed, oil infrastructure targeted—has contributed to “deep environmental scars” in the country.
In the densely populated Gaza Strip, decades of war and occupation exacerbated by the dramatic escalation of conflict since October, 2023, have resulted in severe environmental degradation, leading the UN Trade and Development to warn that Gaza was becoming “uninhabitable”. The UNEP 2024 report Environmental Impact of the Conflict in Gaza outlined this destruction and the collapse of waste management systems, as well as less visible harms including the contamination of land, water resources, and the air by munitions debris and unexploded ordnance. The UNEP told The Lancet that “Gaza’s environmental and public health crises are deeply intertwined, each amplifying the other, [with] the cumulative consequences of these multiple environmental hazards posing a major public health burden.”
According to Weir, the “very high environmental profile” of the war in Ukraine is explained by factors including “the scale of the 2022 invasion with the number of different components of the environment being harmed; intensive mechanised warfare across a very long frontline; and, one-off, high-profile incidents including the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which is completely unprecedented in terms of conflict, and the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam’.’
The most intense combat has taken place in the eastern oblasts, in areas which were, or remain, under occupation. The widespread destruction of settlements, industrial facilities (many of which are located close to urban areas), the natural landscape, and freshwater and coastal environments mean that no part of the country is untouched. In June, 2025, the Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources confirmed that the government has documented more than 8000 cases of environmental damage with total losses to nature exceeding US$94 billion since 2022.
Environmental governance is key to managing conflict pollution and its health effects. Context matters here. Weir told The Lancet that “the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority has for years been trying to navigate environmental protection and advocacy within the context of occupation; however, it has less of a platform and audience than the Ukrainian government, which has been extremely active in its environmental advocacy around the conflict”. The latter is pursuing a post-conflict Green Recovery with support from international partners and seeking accountability for environmental damage. About 250 cases of environmental war crimes and ecocide are being investigated by the Office of the Prosecutor General. According to Donna Cline, Environmental Mobile Justice Team Lead at Global Rights Compliance, because “there has never been a prosecution for environmental harm before one of the international criminal tribunals, there is no precedent. The Ukrainian investigators and prosecutors are some of the only people in the world who have investigated and prosecuted environmental war crimes.”
Underlining the importance accorded to the health implications of environmental harm in its “strategic cooperation” with the government, Jarno Habicht, WHO Representative in Ukraine, told The Lancet that “within and anchored to the broader process of institutional/governance reform, we regularly engage with national stakeholders, [and] communicate with the Ministry of Environment and other partners to see how to assess health implications of environmental harm”. Over the longer term, “environmental damage and degradation of ecosystems will have long-term consequences for human health, which are further exacerbated by climate change. For this reason, WHO is cooperating with national authorities to strengthen their ability to undertake a climate vulnerability assessment that would consider the unique context of the country, including by factoring in increased risks caused by the war.”
Against the backdrop of conflict, documenting causation of the downstream health risks and their correlation with disease outcomes is challenging. According to Daniel Hryhorczuk, Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Illinois, for “many environmental toxins, it has taken decades of research to discover the association between these exposures and their health effects, and even then, many more years to implement effective policy. The causes of illness and death are multifactorial, especially in times of conflict.” In fragile, conflict-affected settings, the data are imperfect and it is not clear what level of evidence is feasible. Although the application of open-source intelligence is becoming increasingly important, the full extent of the damage can be assessed only when hostilities have ceased. Richard Sullivan, Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, told The Lancet that “Expecting every conflict to be covered is not realistic but a more systematic analysis, which would likely involve civil-security actors, is needed to understand wider impacts.”
The challenges confronting fragile health-care systems in these settings are likewise immense. According to Richard Fuller of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, “the legacy of toxins has a downstream impact that can kill for decades. The degree of suffering may be as large as that caused by the conflict itself, especially in modern wars.” More research is necessary to broaden the understanding of exactly how conflict pollution can impact health in exposed populations, and to support resource prioritisation to meet these needs. This is not straightforward. Aula Abbara, consultant in infectious diseases at Imperial College London and co-founder of the Syria Public Health Network, told The Lancet that the “pressure on health systems globally but particularly in areas at risk of conflict and humanitarian crisis is already very high. [In Syria], the resilience of these different systems and communities and emergency response preparedness to deal with these health challenges is therefore lower.” Sullivan told The Lancet that in Gaza and Syria currently there “are more pressing problems. For Gaza its continued survival is at stake with the ongoing genocide and for Syria there are acute issues that mean resources are going to only the most urgent frontline public health and infrastructure priorities.”
According to Habicht, “War is always bad for public health.” Yet until recently, the long-term, cumulative health impacts of conflict pollution have been largely overlooked. Even today, in many long-running conflicts—Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—this toxic legacy passes well below the international radar. Managing the environmental impacts of conflict is today’s challenge. Since 2022, the pace of technological change signals a new era of warfare in which the capacity for environmental harm will probably increase. Zwijnenburg has warned that alongside conflict pollution in Syria other environmental pressures such as climate-linked water shortages, wildfires, and deforestation “are not just long-term concerns—they are converging into an acute crisis”. Despite the difficulties of assessing the health consequences of the toxic remnants of war, bringing them to the forefront of global health policy and humanitarian action is now an urgent task.