Thursday, 27 November 2025

Navy Shows Why The U.S. Is Losing Its Relative Power

moon of alabama

The defeat of the west is in part happening because its loss of the ability to sensibly analyze and manage things. A consequence is the relative loss of power.

Here it is the U.S. Navy demonstrating the issue:

Navy Cuts Constellation-Class Frigate Program Short as Shipbuilding Delays Mount – gCaptain

The U.S. Navy announced Tuesday it is terminating four ships from its troubled Constellation-class frigate program before construction begins, marking a significant strategic shift as the service grapples with mounting delays and seeks faster alternatives for fleet expansion.
Secretary of the Navy John Phelan revealed the decision on social media, stating that while the first two frigates—Constellation (FFG-62) and Congress (FFG-63)—will proceed to completion at Fincantieri Marinette Marine’s Wisconsin shipyard, the Navy has reached a “comprehensive framework” with the Italian-owned contractor to cancel the next four planned vessels in the class.
…
The announcement comes as the program faces severe schedule challenges. The lead ship, originally slated for delivery in April 2026, is now expected three years later in April 2029—a 36-month delay that has raised concerns about the Navy’s ability to execute its modernization plans.

Over the last 20+ years the Navy ship building management has not delivered even one class of ships on time and within the projected price frame. Moreover none ever reached the desired and promised capabilities.

Once there were to be 32 Zumwalt-class destroyers each with 16,000 tons of displacement. Only three were build and only two are active. The ships were supposed to carry new technologies which turned out to be too complicate and too expensive:

The ship is designed around its two Advanced Gun Systems (AGS), turrets with 920-round magazines, and unique Long Range Land Attack Projectile (LRLAP) ammunition. LRLAP procurement was canceled, rendering the guns unusable, so the Navy re-purposed the ships for surface warfare. In 2023, the Navy removed the AGS from the ships and replaced them with hypersonic missiles.

The Navy does not have hypersonic missiles. Until it develops some the extremely expensive destroyers will mostly be useless.

There were also the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) at 3,000 ton displacement which were supposed to be fast and carry changeable weapon modules. The Little Crappy Ships delivered turned out to be unreliable speed boats which could not survive a day in a war. Most modules they were supposed to carry were never built. Seven of the 35 commissioned since 2008 have already been retired. Some with less than five years in service.

To replace the failing LCS program the Navy desired larger multipurpose frigates. To prevent a repeat of the ill fated LCS program an order from above was given to use an existing design. The idea was to buy a ship design from allies that was proven to work and to build it in the U.S. with only minimal modifications.

But the Navy bureaucracy intervened and in 2020 it ended up with this ‘compromise’:

The Navy awarded a partial contract to Fincantieri for the design and construction of the new frigate. The $795M contract is for the basic hull. Extensive Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) will be paid for separately and includes Baseline 10 Aegis Combat System, Mk 41 VLS, Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar, command and control electronics, decoy systems, Mk110 57mm gun, RAM point defense launcher, Naval Strike Missile launcher, SEWIP Blk II … basically everything that isn’t the hull.
The lead ship will cost $1.281 billion, with $795 million of that covering the shipbuilder’s detail design and construction costs and the rest covering the GFE, including the combat systems, radar, launchers, command and control systems, decoys and more.

The Italian/French FREMM frigates are well balanced ships with about 6,000 ton displacement. They are configured to allow for anti-submarine, surface warfare and air defenses. Twenty-two are currently in service.

But the Navy did not like to use weapon systems that were made elsewhere even when they worked well. So it ripped everything out of the hull design and tried to stuff its own type of equipment into it.

Ship design does not work like this. The U.S. radar is heavier which makes the ship top heavy and instable. Thus the hull needs to be widened which decreases the potential speed of the vessel which then requires changes in the machinery and so on and so on. The whole point of buying a working design to prevent a costly design creep was missed.

Moreover the Navy ordered the ships to be build before its desired design changes were even defined. Parts of the ships had to be rebuild when the final designs arrived. The Government Accountability Office wrote a highly critical report on this:

Over at least 2 decades, the Navy’s Constellation class Guided Missile Frigate program plans to acquire and deliver up to 20 frigates—multi-mission, small surface combatant warships—at a combined cost of over $22 billion. To reduce technical risk, the Navy and its shipbuilder modified an existing design to incorporate Navy specifications and weapon systems. However, the Navy’s decision to begin construction before the design was complete is inconsistent with leading ship design practices and jeopardized this approach. Further, design instability has caused weight growth.

The ship class now has a displacement of 7,300 tons which makes it slower than the original design. It also has less endurance. It is more expensive than planned and at least three years behind schedule.

The shipyard that is building these ships did not mind to implement the Navy changes to its own design:

As of November 2024, officials reported that the shipbuilder had submitted five requests for “equitable adjustment”, raising the potential for unbudgeted cost growth. Requests for equitable adjustment provide a remedy payable only when unforeseen or unintended circumstances – such as government modification of a contract – cause an increase in costs. The US Navy deemed the total costs of the five requests “not suitable for public release”. According to officials, these requests relate to government change orders and significant design changes from the frigate’s parent ship design.

The ship yard also did not mind to chancel the program:

The agreement provides continuity of work for the two Constellation-class frigates currently under construction and discontinues the contract for the four other frigates already under contract. Crucially, Fincantieri stated that the Navy will indemnify the company on existing economic commitments and industrial impacts through measures provided as a result of the contractual decision made for the Navy’s convenience.
Looking forward, Fincantieri says it expects to receive new orders to deliver classes of vessels in segments that serve the immediate interests of the nation, including amphibious, icebreaking, and other special missions vessels. The company also stated it will support the U.S. Navy as it redefines strategic choices in the Small Surface Combatants segment, both manned and unmanned.

It’s, of course, a racket.

But behind is also ill discipline. An unwillingness to accept what already has proven to be a good solution. An unreasonable desire for new technology even when it is impractical and overly costly.

The overall result is a Navy that is constantly losing its relative power:

According to a Pentagon estimate, the People’s Liberation Army Navy is expected to have about 400 hulls in the water by the end of this year. Some 50 of those ships are frigates, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The US fleet is around 240 ships and submarines [but no frigates].
It’s a troubling statistic, experts say, with history showing in any confrontation the larger fleet usually wins.

The Pentagon think tank RAND has recognized the decline. It recently published a report that urged the U.S. to accommodate China instead of trying to fight it:

In October of 2025, the RAND Corporation published a report titled “Stabilizing the U.S.–China Rivalry“. Within weeks, the study disappeared from RAND’s website. No explanation. No revision notice. No reupload.
…
The timeline itself suggests a struggle. The study appeared on RAND’s website in mid-October 2025 and was not removed until nearly two weeks later. This is far too slow for a routine correction and far too fast for a scheduled revision. Such a delay is characteristic of an internal contest: the report was vetted, approved, published, and allowed to circulate — until opposition within the policy structure hardened sufficiently to demand its removal. The RAND report was not suppressed because it was mistaken, but because its implications became intolerable after they were recognized.

A well known quote from Sun Tsu urges to know oneself and the enemy to not fear the results of hundred battles. The U.S., it seems, rejects to know either.

Posted by b on November 26, 2025 at 16:57 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/11/the-defeat-of-the-west-and-europes-bleak-future.html

'Home truths' from Melanie Phillips convey one message: Israel will always be at war

David Hearst

25 November 2025 19:56 GMT | Last update: 1 day 7 hours ago

In a speech filled with Islamophobic vitriol, the British commentator has ripped away the last fig leaf concealing Zionism's true purpose

Melanie Phillips speaks at the 'Rage Against the Hate' conference at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, on 27 October 2025 (Screengrab/X)

Ihave known Melanie Phillips for some time. In fact, she was at one point my home desk news editor at the Guardian.

Strange though it may now seem, Phillips in that era epitomised the anguished North London liberal, existentially unsure about whether to obey the dictates of her heart or her head.

Phillips is by no means the only former Guardian colleague to make the journey from soft liberal left to hard Islamophobic right, from an Ed Miliband figure to a Michael Gove. But unlike some I could mention, this rite of passage had little to do with money.

Phillips thought it could help her better serve the cause of Israel, which is now, according to her, under more threat than ever before.

For her, the current idea of Israel is very different from the one she proclaimed at the Guardian, where she was fully at home. It had always been a Zionist newspaper.

The Guardian’s most prominent former editor, CP Scott, was the first major figure in the British media in the early 20th century to espouse the Zionist cause of Chaim Weizmann, an alliance that set the stage for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

But Phillips has gone far beyond the realms of liberal Zionism. She recently gave a chest-thumping account of what she thinks is at stake at a conference in New York City, entitled “Rage Against the Hate”.

All the hate seemed to be coming from the platform, but there was no parody intended in the title.

Phillips declared that it was time to reveal a few home truths. These words are the inevitable precursor to a PR disaster for supporters of Israel, which is what her speech has since become.

Religious war

Very much in the mode of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Phillips declared that there was no such thing as Palestine or Palestinians. In fact, the only indigenous people around were the Jews, who were the only people with any historic, legal or moral entitlement to this land.

To say this while activists in Britain are being arrested for shouting “from the river to the sea” as an allegedly pro-Hamas chant, hands their defence lawyers a get-out-of-jail card.

Because what Phillips is claiming is that all the land from the river to the sea is Jewish. And as she knows, but the Crown Prosecution Service appears not to, “from the river to the sea” has been Likud policy since 1977.

Phillips now wants to turn a conflict principally over land into a religious war - and take on in the process two billion Muslims

For Phillips, Jewish supremacy is too big a civilisational deal to be confined to territorial borders. It also crosses religious boundaries.

Phillips branded Christianity a Jewish sect that had “got slightly out of hand”, to much laughter from her audience, and suggested that all the core values of the West were Jewish.

Phillips branded Islam a “death cult”. She said: “By adopting the language and the moral inversion of the Palestine cause, the West has bought into the agenda for its own destruction at the hands of Islam. This is a death wish by the West, and if you have a death wish, you cannot fight a death cult, which is what the West is facing in the forces of Islam.”

For Phillips, a permanent war that pitches seven million Israeli Jews against 450 million Arabs and 92 million Iranians is somehow not big enough.

Like Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, or Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Phillips now wants to turn a conflict principally over land into a religious war - and take on in the process two billion Muslims.

The only truth

But it was when she tucked into Jews in the diaspora that the wheels truly came off the apple cart. To wield a large scalpel over the very umbilical cord on which Israel depends takes some doing - even for her.

Phillips reminded diaspora Jews that their first loyalty was to Israel. She said they were not just Americans or Britons with Judaism added on; they were part of the “Jewish nation”, and that should come first. Everything else was secondary.

The Jewish diaspora must confront what Israel is doing in our name

Diaspora Jews, according to Phillips, were too soft, too appeasing, too frightened of global public opinion, altogether too Talmudic - which she defined as being too defensive. And Israel should no longer continue “mowing the lawn” - a euphemism for Israeli wars that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians - but plough up that land altogether.

She declared that it was time for Jews to go on the offensive; to reclaim the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible full of stories of Jews in antiquity, “fighting real battles and killing real people”.

The war in Gaza was nothing less than the resurrection of the Tanakh Jew, the return of the heroic Davidic warrior, Phillips proclaimed in triumph.

And so it turns out that Israel’s genocide in Gaza was not a righteous war of self-defence at all, after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, but the resurrection of a biblical prophecy as spelt out in the Tanakh.

In ripping away the last fig leaf that concealed the purpose of Zionism, Phillip’s “home truths” contained one truth, which is now difficult for anyone on any side to deny: that henceforth, the state of Israel is and will be in a permanent state of war.

This message is exactly what Palestinians need New Yorkers to hear.

False ceasefires

For decades, liberals fed willingly at the trough of Israeli myths - principally that Israel would be at peace if only they could find Palestinian moderates to talk to.

Now, they are being told the very opposite: that it is Israel’s biblical destiny to regain a land well beyond its current borders, because all of the land belongs and has been assigned to them by God himself.

Messages like these have already lost the Democrats, but it is from the Christian isolationist wing of Trump’s MAGA support base that Israel has the most to fear.

There is no love lost for Palestinians among this influential group. But they know well and truly get the fact that a messianic Israel permanently at war means a US that is also permanently at war, with large numbers of American troops pinned down forever in the Middle East.

With speeches like that, Phillips, and others like her, will ensure that Israel’s current nosedive in popularity among diaspora Jews in the US will hit ground at an angle of 90 degrees. For this reason alone, I would heartily encourage her to keep talking.

An Israel permanently at war will hardly be news to Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, because that is what they have experienced every day since the so-called ceasefire deal.

To date, more than 300 Palestinians have been killed in around 500 separate violations of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. Gaza is following the pattern set by the “ceasefire” in Lebanon, where Hezbollah withdrew and disarmed its forces south of the Litani River, only to find Israel staying in outposts and continuing to bomb the country, killing more than 300 people and injuring more than 900 in the past year, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Furthermore, Israeli demands have grown. On Sunday, it returned to its campaign of targeting top Hezbollah leaders by assassinating Haytham Ali Tabatabai, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, in a strike in Beirut clearly aimed at provoking a Hezbollah response.

The ceasefire is deemed to exist only because Hamas and Hezbollah have not returned fire. The moment they do, the western media, with one voice, will proclaim the ceasefire is broken.

Unprovoked invasion

In southern Syria, where Israel has seized land the equivalent of the size of Gaza, without a missile or a shot being fired over the border by any militant group, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just performed a victory parade with some of his cabinet ministers.

His appearance on sovereign Syrian territory spelt the end of talks with the new Syrian government, which were in any case deadlocked.

According to sources close to the talks, Israel had demanded not only safe passage to the province of Sweida, but also permanently unimpeded military access to the Kurds in the north, along with the right to inspect and veto all weapons acquired by Damascus.

Neither Iran nor any of the resistance groups that Israel thinks it has defeated in the last two years regards itself as defeated

Netanyahu issued a fresh warning that the string of bases the Israeli army had already set up on Syrian territory, one of them 25 kilometres from Damascus, may not be enough: “This is a mission that can develop at any moment,” he warned.

Netanyahu’s unprovoked invasion of Syria is the surest and quickest way I know of ensuring that Israel’s northern border will be attacked in the future by a rich variety of radical Islamist groups.

If he succeeds in his goal of toppling the US-backed government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, and making central government impossible in a land riven by sectarian tensions, that vacuum will be filled by groups that will have no hesitation in bringing the war to Israel via ground incursions.

Apart from destabilising Syria and making it as difficult as possible for a post-Assad regime to govern nationally, Israel’s military adventurism in Syria is clearly aimed at preparing the ground for another attack on Iran.

Tehran is expecting that attack to come sooner rather than later - but this time, it will not be caught off guard by the presence of fake peace talks with the US.

Spillover conflict

Iranian officials described the country’s posture as defensive during the 12-day war that broke out after it was unilaterally attacked by Israeli and US warplanes this past June. In the next war, it will go on the offensive, particularly against the countries it now sees as a launchpad for drones and surveillance flights: Azerbaijan on its northern border and the UAE just across the Gulf.

“When Israel starts the next round of this war, Iran will respond. But the next time we are attacked, it will spill over into the Gulf and the region. The United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, who are betraying the region, will pay a huge price,” a senior source with knowledge of Iranian thinking told me.

This is no idle threat, as the Emiratis themselves are the first to realise.

Why Israel wants a state of permanent war

In fact, neither Iran nor any of the resistance groups that Israel thinks it has defeated in the last two years regards itself as defeated.

They acknowledge the blows they received when Israel wiped out their leadership multiple times. But each describes those setbacks as tactical rather than strategic - and this is not just propaganda. Each is quickly rearming.

As a movement, Hamas, which is a proscribed organisation in the UK, is more popular and has more offers of support in the region than it has ever had in its existence.

According to a poll conducted last month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, if new legislative elections were held in Palestine tomorrow, 65 percent said they would participate, and of those, 44 percent would vote for Hamas, while 30 percent would support Fatah. Around 70 percent said they staunchly opposed the disarmament of Hamas.

This is chiefly down to the fact that this generation of fighters learned the lessons of the Nakbas of 1948 and 1967, and former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s humiliating exit from Beirut when surrounded by the Israeli army in 1982.

Empty resolution

The second stage of the “ceasefire” in Gaza, after Hamas handed over all of the live hostages and the bodies of dead hostages in its possession, is just as mired as the first was.

No Arab or Muslim countries are willing to contribute troops to the proposed International Stabilisation Force without either a clear mandate or a path to Palestinian statehood. Azerbaijan will not agree to deploy troops unless Turkey does.

King Abdullah of Jordan will not touch it. He told the BBC: “Peacekeeping is that you’re sitting there supporting the local police force, the Palestinians, which Jordan and Egypt are willing to train in large numbers, but that takes time. If we’re running around Gaza on patrol with weapons, that’s not a situation that any country would like to get involved in.”

It’s the same story from the UAE, Egypt and Indonesia. Forced to look ever further east, US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have approached Singapore, which was reportedly surprised by the request.

Representatives to the United Nations meet at the UN Security Council on 17 November 2025 to vote on US President Donald Trump's 20-point plan for Gaza (Angela Weiss/AFP)

And it’s the same story with the proposed membership of the "Board of Peace". No one knows who is on it or where the money for it is coming from. No Palestinian government has been formed, and there is no clear plan to do so.

One could go on, but it is clear that the UN Security Council resolution that set all this up has no planning, no commitments, no money and no personnel behind it. Of all the empty resolutions the UN has passed on this conflict, this is surely the emptiest.

If this counts as peace, it is unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, and probably for purely electoral reasons, Netanyahu will make good on his threat to “finish the job” - after two years of war where he patently failed to do just that.

And Phillips, for one, will be delighted, as yet more blood is shed. Her unvarnished Islamophobic vitriol will not bar her from appearing on BBC Question Time or the Moral Maze, nor will anyone dare to challenge her zealotry.

Phillips is right. The West, and the BBC along with it, is sinking - but it is sinking because it tolerates and accommodates voices like hers.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/melanie-phillips-home-truths-convey-one-message-israel-will-always-be-war

The Ecocide of Gaza

In the past two years, Israeli obliteration has turned Gaza into an uninhabitable death zone. What is less known, however, is that this is the effect of decades of deliberate ecocide – and of the West’s purposeful efforts to undermine both genocide and ecocide legislation.

by Dan Steinbock | Nov 26, 2025 | 4 Comments

The final step of the broadest possible genocide is ecocide; that is, the intentional destruction of the environment necessary for the support of human life.

Ecocide, in turn, is directly related to the decimation of the reproduction of culture that Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer of the Genocide Convention, associated with the concept of “cultural genocide.”

Gaza is a textbook case.

The long legal effort to suppress ecocide

In The Obliteration Doctrine, I show in painful detail how Lemkin had to compromise this idea. While he got strong support from the countries of the Global South, the former colonial powers, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, undermined Lemkin’s quest. Consequently, the current Genocide Convention is just a mutilated torso of the original idea.

Ever since Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister, accused the United States of ecocide at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, war has often seen as the primary cause of ecocide, along with over-exploitation of natural resources and industrial disasters.

In environmental law, ecocide (from ancient Greek oikos ‘home’ and Latin caedere ‘to kill’) connotes the destruction of the environment by humans. It has often been associated with genocide. In effect, in the late 1990s ecocide in peacetime was to have been included in the Rome Statute. However, it was deleted due to objections by the United Kingdom, France, and the United States; that is, by the former colonial powers. Such censure would not have surprised Lemkin who knew well that these powers did not want to pay for their crimes in the world court. Nonetheless, as a result, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court makes no provision for the crime of ecocide in peacetime, only in wartime.

Just months before October 7, 2023, the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide defined it as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

The decades-long ecocide in Gaza

Well before October 7, 2023, the Gaza Strip had progressively been isolated from the West Bank and the outside world overall, while being subjected to repeated Israeli military incursions – over three decades, in parallel with the Madrid and Oslo peace talks.

In terms of environmental damage, deterioration had worsened since 2014, when the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israeli military close to the eastern border of Gaza had been coupled with the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides. These illicit practices not only destroyed entire swaths of formerly arable land along the border fence but also crops and farmlands hundreds of meters deep into Palestinian territory, resulting in the loss of livelihoods for Gazan farmers.

In a historical view, such massive bombardment went back to the early days of the Cold War, when the United States dropped bombs on North Korean dams to flood crops and induce starvation among civilians. To compound the same effect, irrigation systems were attacked on the ground. The difference is that in Gaza the geographic scope of destruction was far narrower than in Korea, but the decimation far more effective, intensive and lethal.

Colonial violence and environmental warfare

From the beginning, “environmental warfare in Gaza” has been marked by colonial violence. It has been an inherent part of the Palestinian expulsions and Israeli occupation since the late 1940s.

Furthermore, the destruction is central to the Obliteration Doctrine of the Israeli military, which was initiated in Lebanon in the late 2000s and perfected in Gaza in 2023-25. In that sense, the Nakba has also a lesser-known environmental dimension, “the complete transformation of the environment, the weather, the soil, the loss of the indigenous climate, the vegetation, the skies. The Nakba is a process of colonially imposed vulnerability to climate change.”

Even at the eve of October 7, World Bank analysts warned that in the West Bank and Gaza, drivers of fragility, development constraints, and vulnerability to climate change were closely interconnected, thanks to decades of the fragmentation of land, restrictions on the movement of people and goods, recurrent episodes of violent conflict, persistent political and policy uncertainty, and the lack of sovereign control over critical natural resources.

As the net effect of the Gaza War, widespread damages to built-up areas from the use of explosive weapons have resulted in direct impacts on water services and in millions of tons of debris, toxic waste and destroyed agricultural lands. This has led to the outbreak of communicable diseases from poor water, health and sanitation conditions, combined with the risk of exposure to a range of additional hazardous materials and the collapse of environmental governance.

The death zone

Hence, the damage to water infrastructure and widescale urban destruction in combination with a severely degraded healthcare system; all of which posed a long-lasting threat to both public health and livelihoods.

The future that awaited Palestinians at the end of the hostilities was a Gaza turned into an “uninhabitable death war zone.”

By late April 2024, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza had already created 37m tonnes of debris. That amounts to an average of 300kg of rubble per square meter of land in the Gaza Strip. Worse, much of these piles and heaps of debris and wreckage were laced with unexploded bombs, which could take up to 15 years of extensive work to remove, assuming the availability of 100 trucks on a daily basis.

Taking into consideration the fact that on average about 10 percent of weapons failed to detonate when fired, huge demining teams would be warranted for years. The longer the war continued, the longer would the clearance take at its end.

During the first two months of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the projected emissions from there exceeded the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.

Indeed, the total emissions increased to more than those of over 33 individual countries and territories when the war infrastructure built by both Israel and Hamas is included, such as Hamas’s tunnel network and Israel’s protective fence or “Iron Wall.” In that light, the carbon costs of reconstructing Gaza are likely to prove huge.

Rebuilding emissions

Effectively, rebuilding Gaza will result in a total annual emissions figure higher than that of over 130 countries, putting them on a par with that of New Zealand.

The overwhelming majority of the 281,000 metric tons (MT) of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated in the first two months of hostilities can be traced to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza.

Almost half the total carbon emissions were down to U.S. cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel. By contrast, Hamas rockets fired into Israel in the same period generated 713 MT of CO2, which is equivalent to 300 MT of coal. There was no symmetry in war machinery.

The initial brutal offensive by Hamas was overwhelmed by Israel’s obliteration of what used to be Gaza. Worse, these estimates are highly conservative because they are based on just two months of the war that had already endured three times longer by June 2024.

More importantly, the actual carbon footprint could prove five to eight times higher, when emissions from the entire war supply chain were included.

Furthermore, what has happened in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. Even the perpetrators cannot avoid their own poison.

Spillovers of ecocide

The overall cost for rebuilding Gaza is estimated to be tens of billions of dollars over decades, with some projections reaching as high as $70 billion.

The obliteration of Gaza has inflicted severe and potentially irreversible environmental damage, including widespread contamination of water, soil, and air with toxic substances, the collapse of critical infrastructure, and massive carbon emissions.

The effects of this environmental catastrophe are likely to mimic those of past conflicts involving widespread environmental destruction – for instance, U.S. deployment of Agent Orange in Vietnam – which in one form or another will likely be felt by Israeli citizens for years or decades to come.

In the foreseeable future, these key impacts on Israel may include public health crises, water contamination, adverse agricultural and economic effects, rising contribution into climate change, not to mention the security concerns that will ensue from the deliberate creation of an uninhabitable environment in Gaza.

As Israeli environmental groups warned already a decade ago, the untreated sewage from Gaza that has flowed into the Mediterranean Sea is a ticking time bomb. Following the obliteration of Gaza, the destruction of wastewater treatment facilities creates a significant risk of infectious diseases, even cholera, that could spread along the coast. Additionally, the potential contamination of shared coastal aquifers with seawater, heavy metals, and chemicals poses a long-term threat to Israel’s freshwater supplies.

The inconvenient truth is that water contamination, like ecocide, knows no borders.

The original version was published by Informed Comment (US) on November 25, 2025.

https://original.antiwar.com/Dan_Steinbock/2025/11/25/the-ecocide-of-gaza/

ISRAELI ENTITLEMENT Israel tried to spread fake stories in China after 10/7 to gain support

https://x.com/GenXGirl1994/status/1993790967669747835

GenXGirl

@GenXGirl1994

ISRAELI ENTITLEMENT Israel tried to spread fake stories in China after 10/7 to gain support by claiming 1 of the Israeli hostages, Noa Argamani, is a Chinese citizen. When they interviewed her mom, she confirmed it was a lie but demanded: “YOU Chinese have a DUTY to help me”

8:16 AM · Nov 27, 2025

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