Visual analysis: the growth of Gaza’s wartime trash mountains

The once-bustling streets of Gaza City are now largely deserted, their buildings flattened after fierce fighting. But in some streets, strange shapes have risen: mountains of rubbish taller than a person’s height.

As Israel’s war with militant group Hamas ravages the besieged Gaza strip, many basic services have collapsed. Trash collection is among them, meaning that as Gazans have fled Israeli bombings from one part of the strip to another, growing mountains of waste have followed.

The heaps have grown so large that their vast, chaotic shapes are visible in satellite images taken from hundreds of kilometres above the Earth.

Before the war began in October, Gaza’s sewage processing and trash collection were already severely hampered by the Israeli blockade that started in 2007 after Hamas took control of the enclave. Trash pick-ups were haphazard: some rubbish was collected by employees paid by Hamas’s West Bank rival, the Palestinian Authority, while others worked for international aid groups.

Nearly all of that dysfunctional tapestry of services has been disrupted by the war, leaving waste as an unavoidable visual symbol of how completely the conflict has devastated even the meagre infrastructure that existed in Gaza.

More than 140 solid waste dump sites are sprawled across the narrow 41km-long Gaza Strip, according to satellite analysis of Planet Labs imagery by the Financial Times, Dutch NGO PAX and Marilena Zigka of Princeton University.

Wim Zwijnenburg of PAX said: “Solid waste dumps, both official landfills and informal dumps, have specific features that can be used to identify them in satellite imagery . . . the grey-scale colours, the irregular shape of waste dumps and the location are helpful identifiers.”

Further locations were identified and sites discovered by satellite verified through open-source investigation of social media clips and photos.

The smell and sight of garbage is ever-present in Gaza. Aid agencies that are struggling to convey even the bare minimum of food to Palestinians in the strip have been largely powerless to combat the spread of rotting rubbish.

“Everywhere you look there is a pile of trash,” said Louise Wateridge, spokesperson for UNRWA, the main UN agency working in Gaza, after spending three weeks in the enclave ending in mid-May.

Most of Gaza’s population is now crammed into the south of the besieged strip, which had little waste management capacity before the war to support what was then a much smaller population.

Om Abdelrahman, a mother of two whose latest refuge is the crowded coastal area of Al-Mawasi, described abject scenes as displaced people crammed into tents surrounded by garbage.

“It is very crowded and the tents are too close to each other in a disorderly way and without any services,” said Om Abdelrahman. “There are garbage piles everywhere, and no system to remove it. The mosquito bites started even before the summer.”

Earlier this year some 1.2mn people took shelter in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza after they were forced to flee other parts of the enclave. Infrastructure in the city designed for 250,000 people could not cope with the influx.

Most of those people have now left again on instructions from Israel — many to Al-Mawasi — but those remaining must contend with immense waste heaps. Al-Mawasi itself, while labelled by Israel as a “humanitarian zone”, almost entirely lacks infrastructure.

Israel, for its part, has made little headway in creating any alternative civilian administration as it seeks to destroy Hamas — a gap which has made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the target of criticism even from within his own government.

Wateridge described massive mounds of fetid rubbish between shelters for displaced people in Rafah’s streets. On the road to Khan Younis, the main city in southern Gaza, there were huge mounds of “trash build-up, as far as you can see on an open street”, she said.

In Jabalia, in the devastated north of Gaza, which has borne the full brunt of Israel’s offensive since the start of the war, it has been too dangerous to move any rubbish, Wateridge added.

“There’s no services there to be able to move it and there’s nowhere to move it. It’s been a very active area of military operation,” she said. “I’m five foot five and the trash piles were all bigger than me all along the sides of the road.”

While larger, informal piles of waste are typically located in relatively remote spots — such as in open tracts of land, near roads, or outside formal landfills — smaller sites are often metres from where displaced Palestinians are living in tent camps.

“In the case of Gaza, in particular Gaza City, this often also means in areas abandoned after intense fighting, [there are] often complete streets filled with solid waste,” said Zwijnenburg.

Before the war, Gaza’s population produced a daily average of 1,700 tonnes of garbage with only two main landfills to manage this volume, according to the UNDP, which said at least one was operating far beyond capacity for years.

Some garbage collection was carried out by UNRWA, which looked after areas across the region housing Palestinian refugees who fled the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948, and their descendants.

Municipalities and village councils also collected rubbish in cities and other parts of Gaza. Across Gaza, some 1,200 staff, 500 donkey carts, 76 collection vehicles and 23 other pieces of machinery were involved in the trash collection effort, according to the UN.

Since the latest incursion began, some collection has taken place: earlier this year about 10,000 tonnes of waste was collected from around Rafah and Khan Younis, in an initiative carried out by the UN supporting a local organisation. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

UNRWA said Israel continues to deny its garbage collection services access to landfills in Israel. The Israeli military directed queries on the subject to COGAT, an arm of the ministry of defence responsible for civilian issues in occupied Palestinian territories, which did not respond.

“My colleagues . . . ask on an almost [daily] basis to have access to landfill sites to safely remove the rubbish, but they are denied access by the Israeli authorities,” said Wateridge. “A lot of our sanitation centres, machinery and trucks for removing trash have been destroyed.”

During more than seven months of war, Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 people, according to Palestinian authorities, and reduced much of the territory to a rubble-strewn wasteland. The Jewish state launched its offensive in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 cross-border attack in Israel that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.

In Gaza, people huddle in UN shelters and makeshift camps that are direly short of basic necessities such as food, clean water, healthcare, safe waste collection and sewage disposal. Gaza’s already inadequate sewage treatment plants have also ceased operating because of a lack of fuel, leaving raw effluent flowing freely to the sea.

“As the weather gets warmer, it just creates more problems, not only with the stench but with the spread of diseases and with pests like mice, rats and mosquitoes which make diseases spread even more,” said Wateridge.

Skin infections, Hepatitis A and diarrhoea, all especially devastating for the young, are on the increase. A Johns Hopkins study earlier this year warned that if these diseases turned into an epidemic, as many as 11,000 Palestinians could die of easily preventable infectious diseases before the peak of summer.

Gazans, often including children, who pick through garbage for useful, edible or saleable items, face particular health risks, including from medical waste that is often mixed in with general rubbish, said Zwijnenburg.

Soil and water are also becoming contaminated. Civilians, he said, “are facing direct and long-term risks from the mounting solid waste crisis”.