*A few updates as of summer, 2024:
Five years ago I wrote in the series linked below* that Israel had destroyed its environment to the point it was a dying patient on the gurney. With its Gaza Genocide , Israel is taking itself off life support.
1) Well over 100,000 Israelis running away from Hamas in the south, the Houthi in the Southeast, and Hezbollah in the North for the past year increase stress on water and sewage infrastructure in communities they’ve retreated to. In addition Israeli agriculture, which was nominal to start with, saw an 80% drop in produce. What agriculture Israelis had along both the Gaza and Lebanon borders is out the window not only from abandonment and lack of laborers, but from the fields being crushed by 60 ton tanks running all over on the Israeli side.
1) To Israel’s South: The world’s attention is on Gaza, now a bombed out wasteland with 2 million starving souls, against whom Israel has cut off food, water, power, sanitation, and medical care. But stupid Israel has its own troops walking, eating, sleeping in the toxic debris of modern war; chemical weapons, white phosphorus, gas compounds that are banned by international agreement on the battlefield, DIME rounds, depleted uranium… ticking time bombs in Jewish bodies that will cause lifelong harm to Israeli troops and impact the Israeli health care system for as long as the regime lasts. All that stuff is leaching into the ground and coastal aquifer which will eventually spread back into Israel along with diseases, including polio, that have broken out in Gaza. Israeli troops infected while they’re killing Palestinians may bring polio, etc. back into Israel and spread it from there to other parts of the world. Again, untreated Gaza sewage is flowing north with the current along the shores of Israel.
2) To Israel’s Southeast: the indomitable Houthi, in support of Gaza, attacking with bottle rockets from shore and from skiffs with outboard motors, drove an American aircraft carrier battle group sent to protect Israel, out of the Red Sea (!) The Houthi blockade has cut off food and fuel deliveries to the Jewish state from that direction so effectively that Eliat, Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, has shut down and declared bankruptcy. This blockade reveals Israel’s utter dependence on food and fuel imports. At the same time, the blockade has been an environmental disaster from burning oil tankers by the Houthi, a burning oil refinery by Israel, and toxic missile exchanges by both sides.
3) To Israel’s North: Hezbollah has driven over 90,000 Israelis away from the border. As with the Gaza border, agriculture there has tanked. The Israelis estimate 56 square miles on the Israel occupied north (and three miles along the Gaza border) have burned this year from fires started by drones and rockets. There’s also toxic waste from missiles and drones. As noted elsewhere conflict in Palestine is changing the albedo of the region for the worse. That is, the land is getting darker and dark absorbs more heat from sun instead of reflecting it back to space. And presumably Israel’s 1,500 foot deep water wells and Dick Cheney’s oil drilling operations in the occupied Golan Heights are impacted.
4) To Israel’s West: America’s Zionist controlled government has deployed half the US Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to defend Israel. Anyone who has served on a Naval ship knows they are an environmental disaster all by themselves at any time but at the moment they have joined Israel in threatening the resistance, including Iran, with attacks using nuclear weapons. Russia and China are backing Iran and they have nuclear weapons, too.
5) Internationally: On July 28, 2024 President Erdogan of Turkey threatened to invade Israel over atrocities in Palestine. President Erdogan is written off by the Jewish state as a blow-hard at Israel’s peril. Oil tankers that supply Israel depart from Turkey. If Turkey joins BRICS in October 2024, and it may, the country just might turn off the spigot to Ashkelon.
Turkey update: November 13, 2024. President Erdogan severs diplomatic relations to Israel. Still hasn’t cut the oil supply. Stay tuned.
Turkey update II: First week of January 2025: Last month an amalgam of terrorist groups under the umbrella entity HTS, which is distilled from Al Quada/ISIS, and led by fine fellow and purported head chopper Abu Mohammad al-Julani (who the US had placed a $10 million price on his head, but the US has removed the bounty because apparently he’s working for the US now) along with various shadow entities like criminal gangs, all backed by Western Governments plus Turkey and Israel, have taken over Syria. A coup. President Assad has fled the country. Bound on carving up Syria for themselves to seize oil and water, Turkey was bombing northern Syria and had established bases there even before the HTS coup, [In November 2024, Turkey cut off water to a million people in Syria.]
At the same time, Israel is carpet bombing Syria and trying to establish presence in South Syria in the direction of the Mt. Hermon watershed which the Zionists have been after for more than a century.* Israel thinks this is all great and is gleefully taking credit for Syria’s misery. More objective analysts consider this another own-goal by Israel and expect the result to end up about as well as Israel backing/funding Hamas in its early days to help it get started. In addition, expect Iraq will come into play as Turkey exploits Syrian water that previously flowed to Iraq.
August 19, 2024 President Petro of Columbia banned coal exports to Israel over the Gaza Genocide. Until this week, Columbia was Israel’s largest supplier of coal. Columbia is also committed to joining BRICS.
May 2024. Brazilian President Luiz da Silva recalled Brazil’s Ambassador to Israel while condemning the Gaza Genocide. Brazil, the ‘B’ in BRICS, is a major food supplier to Israel.
Russia, the ‘R’ in BRICS, also supplies food to Israel. That may change as Russia is backing resistance to Israel including supplying weapons to Iran.
Summer 2024 Iraqi resistance group are targeting US bases in Iraq that are protecting oil supplies that go through Turkey to Israel. Israeli media reported in 2015 that Israel was getting 3/4 of its oil from Iraq.
August,29, 2024: Nambia refuses to let cargo ship believed to be carrying weapons to Israel dock at Walvis Bay. Nambians affirm support for Palestine and International Law.
November 16, 2024: Haifa Bay vulnerability scenario: We’re coming up on the 83rd anniversary of one of the coolest military raids in history. December 19, 1941, six Italian frogmen on scuba rode three torpedos into Alexandria Harbor where they mined and sank two British battleships, and crippled a destroyer and an oil carrier. Six guys did that! I thought of those guys when Hamas came over the wall on October 7, 2023. Both raids were so low-tech, so outrageous, and the enemy was so full of itself, that the underdogs pulled it off. I bring this up because Israel imports the overwhelming majority of its food by sea and the Houthi have already shut down Israel’s Red Sea port at Eliat. With Eliat gone that leaves Israel’s Mediterranean main port at Haifa, and Ashdod, and Ashkelon, plus a tenuous road through Arab countries that are could close the road in a moment.
Hamas and Hezbollah have been hammering Haifa with drones,- we see the airborne ones but they’ve got underwater drones as well. Haifa Harbor is only about 14 meters deep at the grain dock; if Hamas or Hezbollah hit, say a bulk grain carrier loaded with 30,000 tons of wheat as it entered between Haifa’s Main Breakwater and the Lee Breakwater, the ship wouldn’t have room to turn away. A loaded grain ship has a draft of about 8.2 meters. Leaving just about 17 feet between the keel and the harbor mud.
Now, (stay with me on this) grain carriers are required to have double the reserve stability of other vessels because the cargo settles as the ship rocks around at sea. As the cargo settles it creates a void at the top of the holds. The need for higher stability is because grains have a greater tendency to slide when they’re tipped than other cargoes. This is called the angle of repose. If the ship heels too far the whole cargo starts to slide down towards the lower side. In short; the Palestinian resistance doesn’t have to sink the ship, only do sufficient damage to make it tilt enough to roll over on its own. Haifa would shut down.
https://www.dickcallahan.net/category/israel-and-palestine/baseline-of-a-desecrated-land/
