The carbon footprint of a genocide

Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages

The International Court of Justice heard, last month, that after reconstruction is factored in Israel’s war on Gaza will have emitted 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A figure equivalent to the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.

It seems somehow wrong to be writing about the carbon footprint of Israel’s 15-month onslaught on Gaza.

The human cost is so unfathomably ghastly. A recent article in the medical journal The Lancet put the death toll due to traumatic injury at more than 68,000 by June of last year (40% higher than the Gaza Health Ministry’s figure.)

An earlier letter to the Lancet by a group of scientists argued the total number of deaths – based on similar conflicts – is likely to be at least four times the number directly killed by bombs and bullets.

Seventy-four children were killed in the first week of 2025 alone. More than a million children are currently living in makeshift tents with regular reports of babies freezing to death.

Nearly two million of the strip’s 2.2 million inhabitants are displaced.

Ninety-six percent of Gaza’s children feel death is imminent and 49% wish to die, according to a study sponsored by the War Child Alliance.

I could, and maybe should, go on. The horrors visited on Gaza are truly apocalyptic and haven’t received anywhere near the coverage in our mainstream media that they deserve.

The contrast with the blanket coverage of the LA fires that have killed 25 people to date is instructive. The lives and property of those in the rich world are deemed far more newsworthy than those living – if you can call it that – in what retired Israeli general Giora Eiland described as a giant concentration camp.

The two stories have one thing in common: climate change.

In the case of the LA fires the role of climate change gets mentioned – though not as much as it should.

But the planet destroying emissions generated by the genocide committed against the Palestinians rarely makes the news.

Incredibly, when the State of Palestine – which is responsible for 0.001% of global emissions told the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, last month, that the first 120 days of the war on Gaza resulted in emissions of between 420,000 and 650,000 tonnes of carbon and other greenhouse gases it went largely unreported.

For context that’s the equivalent to the total annual emissions of 26 of the lowest-emitting states.

Jet fuel burned by Israeli fighter planes contributed about 157,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Transporting the bombs dropped on Gaza from the US to Israel contributed another 159,000 tonnes of CO2e.

Those figures won’t appear in the official carbon emissions of either country due to an obscene exemption for military emissions that the US insisted on in the Kyoto negotiations. The US military’s carbon footprint is larger than any other institution in the world.

Professor of law Kate McIntosh, speaking on behalf of the State of Palestine, told the ICJ hearings, on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, that the emissions to date were just a fraction of the likely total.

Once post-war reconstruction is factored in the figure is estimated to balloon to 52 million tonnes of CO2e – a figure higher than the annual emissions of 126 states and territories.

Far too many leaders of the rich world have turned a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza, others have actively enabled it but as the fires in LA show there’s no escaping the impacts of climate change.

The US has contributed more than $20 billion to Israel’s war on Gaza – a huge figure but one that is dwarfed by the estimated $250 billion cost of the LA fires.

And what price do you put on tens of thousands who died from heatwaves, floods and wildfires around the world in 2024?

The genocide in Gaza isn’t only a crime against humanity, it’s an ecocide that threatens the planet and every living thing on it.