Band-aiding Gaza: Israel’s war may have ceased, but Palestine’s battles remain

At 12:00 local time on Friday, October 10, 2025, a deal brokered by US President Donald Trump led Israel and Palestine to agree for a ceasefire, ending the two-year war. The first phase of 'Trump's plan' will see exchange of hostages (20 Israelis in exchange for around 250 Palestinian prisoners, and 1,700 detainees from Gaza). Yet within hours of the announcement, the world's attention turned towards Oslo. At 11 am CEST, the world waited to see if Trump (with the possibility of former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair in tow) would be able to inveigle the Nobel Peace Prize for himself. Good sense prevailed. In the past the prize has gone to a few rogues, many of them, warmongers. This time though the world was spared such an insult.

What led to the manic war was the misguided attack by Hamas militants on unarmed Israeli civilians, which shocked the world and shattered a fragile regional calm. The attack was made on the fiftieth anniversary of the fourth Arab-Israeli war, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.

Historians have conveniently described the Israel-Arab conflicts as extensions of the continued tensions among the Abrahamic religions. Post-colonial and Cold War historians see them as the outcome of unresolved political issues that escalate into conflict each time. But there are deeper entanglements that need to be explored.

Seen from the perspective of nature, the region’s history is not only about territorial claims or religious tensions. The region’s wars are also about water and land. Like water, the region’s semi-arid and arid landscapes like grasslands, rocky hills, and deserts hold tremendous meaning and value for those who have lived here.

Until the colonial partition in the 1940s, the region and its desert were home mostly to nomads and pastoralists, primarily Arab, among others. During the colonial period, these communities were forced to abandon their traditional lifestyles and adopt a sedentary one.

Negev: Israel’s contested desert

Central to the region’s problem is the Negev Desert. It stretches over 13,000 square kilometres, roughly 60 per cent of Israel’s territory. The desert delineates Israel’s borders with Egypt’s Sinai Desert to the south, the Gaza Strip to the southwest, and Jordan’s Arava Valley to the southeast. The region has historically been a battleground between farmers and herders of all kinds; Arab, Christian, Jewish, and others. The Negev was largely uninhabited and de facto belonged to the Bedouins.

Bedouin life depended on nomadic pastoralism and semi-settled, patchy dry farming, with seasonal migrations alongside their camels, sheep, and goats. Jewish settlements of European descent were organised in the Negev in the early 1940s.

Today, there are roughly 330,000 Bedouins in the Negev, 77 per cent of whom live in authorised settlements, while the rest live in unauthorised villages. Fewer than 7 per cent of the Bedouins now rely on livestock; most work as wage labourers. As more immigrants, predominantly Jewish, arrived, the desert’s population swelled and exceeded its carrying capacity.

In 1940, there were 449,000 Jews and roughly 1,150,000 Arabs, Christians, and other minorities in Palestine, a ratio of 30:70. By 2024, there were 7,427,000 Jewish people and 2,653,000 Arabs (roughly 75:25). The proportions have flipped in just eight decades. At its peak in the 1960s, there were eight times more immigrants than natives.

Environmental and climatic shifts have heightened conflicts, especially where resources are unevenly shared. Governance systems on both sides lacked the strength to settle disputes. Water-sharing became the starting point for skirmishes, first between communities, and later between countries.

The war over water

Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, three demilitarised zones emerged along the Israel-Syria border, drawn to preserve Israel’s water assets. This no man’s land was born of unresolved conflict. The largest zone, fanning out from the southeast, protected the areas between the Sea of Galilee and the Yarmuk River. It sits uneasily at the meeting point of Israel, Jordan, and Syria, where geography and politics collided most acutely.

By the early 1950s, Israel began expanding its agriculture, which required diverting and pumping water from the Jordan-Yarmuk river systems and the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake lying entirely within Israel. Year after year, Israel added to its network of pipelines. In June 1964, a drought gripped the region. Yet, as water grew scarce, only Jewish communities received piped water; the Arabs got little, and the Bedouins got none. Water, or the lack of it, became a cause of both conflict and cooperation among all communities.

Tensions escalated as pipelines deprived Syria of downstream flow. By November 1964, skirmishes began, which turned into battles and then into war. For over a decade, the US had been pressuring all parties to find a just and acceptable solution, but no consensus emerged. The West labelled it the first Arab-Israeli conflict; the Arabs called it the “War over Water”.

Israel’s diversion of water from the rivers enraged the Arab nations. Syria and Jordan (along with Palestine) raised the issue at the Arab League meeting in Cairo. The League, comprising 13 countries but excluding Palestine, did little beyond Egypt’s support. Yet, in Cairo, the League resolved to thwart Israel’s efforts. 

In November 1964, the Syrians fired the first shots at Israel’s waterworks known as the National Water Carrier. Israel retaliated. The Arab coalition soon realised it could no longer halt Israel’s scheme and instead planned to divert the Jordan River’s flow into the Yarmuk. Work began in February 1965. The Arab scheme was technically challenging and expensive, but if successful, it would have diverted a third of Israel’s water to Syria. Israel saw this as an infringement of its sovereign rights. Border clashes turned into full-scale war.

In July 1966, Israel’s air force destroyed Syria’s earth-moving equipment. As expenses mounted, the Arab states abandoned their water project, leaving the issue unresolved. Water politics, specifically, control and access to river systems, was a crucial driver of the Six-Day War in June 1967, and has remained so ever since.

With each passing decade, Syria and Palestine have received less and less water from rivers and virtually nothing through pipelines. In the current two-year war, killing people through thirst and hunger has been an important part of Israel’s strategy. In the West Bank, Palestinians reported at least 62 attacks on wells and pipelines this year alone, turning water into another weapon of domination and dispossession.

Who will rebuild Gaza?

We cannot yet fathom the full environmental cost of the war. The post-war recovery may have an even greater ecological toll than the conflict itself. From a purely humanitarian perspective, around 600 trucks will need to roll into Gaza daily for at least six months to prevent starvation deaths among at least half a million people — the diseased and the dying. Winters are expected to be harsh this year, further complicating recovery.

Ironic as it may seem, Gaza lent its name to the word gauze, a loosely woven cotton bandage made of thin, breathable fabric, used to cover and protect wounds.

So, who can we expect to pay for Gaza’s, or, more importantly, Palestine’s, reconstruction? Clearly, the capitalist-leaning multilateral system will see little worth in investing in Gaza’s war-mangled wasteland. They can save themselves the blushes, since Palestine is not a member of the World Bank or similar institutions.

The US’s no-aid policy will hurt the region; the EU is too fragmented, cowering under Trump’s tariff war and its own energy crisis. The Arab world is too broken, too deterred and perhaps too conceited to help its own. Gaza is a “basket case” that not even a well-endowed Arab nation will pay for.

For the etymologically inclined, basket case is a pejorative American term once used for soldiers who had lost their limbs and become burdens to society. During the Cold War, it referred to countries deemed severe liabilities to the world. Henry Kissinger labelled Bangladesh a “basket case”. Ironically, he received the Nobel Prize for bringing “peace” in wars in which the US fought, orchestrated, or was complicit including the Bangladesh genocide.

More worrying is the moral bankruptcy of the world’s leaders and institutions at present. Most countries failed to recognise the war as genocide. Virtually all have forgotten Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Perhaps the epitome of this travesty was the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. It set up no global commission, nor supported any national inquiry. To rub salt into the wound, the director-general of the WHO, under whose watch the pandemic unfolded, was re-elected unopposed.

More recently, the farcical conclusion of the Global Plastic Treaty negotiations in August 2025, we are told, took place under a corrupt chair.

History, as one would like to understand it in its full glory and nastiness, must be read, heard, and imagined from all perspectives. Humans amplify, deflect, distort, or forget fragments of history. History depends on the times, perspectives, and circumstances in which it is remembered and repeated. Nature remembers, just as it forewarns. Its perspective, perhaps, is the more truthful one.

Pranay Lal is a biochemist, a public health specialist and a natural history writer.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth