Lebanon has accused Israel of spraying a herbicide linked to cancer on farmland in the south of the country as a “health crime” that would threaten food security and farmers’ livelihoods.
The country’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned what he called “an environmental and health crime” and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and he vowed to take “all necessary legal and diplomatic measures to confront this aggression”.
Israel’s government did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, but the alleged spraying bolsters accusations that its military is carrying out a campaign of ecocide with the aim of making southern Lebanon uninhabitable, similar to its activities in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
The latest incident is alleged to have taken place on Sunday morning. UN peacekeepers have said they were warned by the Israeli military to remain under cover while it carried out an aerial operation to drop what they said was a non-toxic chemical substance. Videos captured light aircraft spraying extensively over agricultural areas.
Lebanese authorities said that laboratory analysis identified that the spray contained glyphosate, a potent herbicide that was in 2015 classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
One of the world’s most widely used herbicides, glyphosate is also sprayed on many crops just before harvest to dry them out. But studies have found glyphosate-based herbicides can interfere with various organs and biochemical pathways in mammals.
In a joint statement, Lebanon’s ministries of agriculture and the environment said some samples showed glyphosate concentrations “20 and 30 times higher than normal [use]”. Its use would, they said, “damage vegetation in the targeted areas, with direct repercussions on agricultural production, soil fertility and ecological balance.
The statement continued: “The two ministries affirm that the spraying of chemicals from military aircraft over Lebanese territory constitutes a serious act of aggression that threatens food security, inflicts severe damage on natural resources, and undermines the livelihoods of farmers, in addition to posing potential health and environmental risks to water, soil, and the entire food chain.”
In the days leading up to the incident, videos also emerged of Israeli planes appearing to spray agricultural areas inside Syria on three occasions in the space of a week.
The southern Lebanese countryside still bears the ecological scars of an intense campaign by the Israeli military against Hezbollah that ended just over a year ago.
In addition to an estimated 4,000 people killed, 17,000 injured and 1.2 million displaced, Israel has been accused of using white phosphorus and incendiary bombs that burned farmland, olive groves and forests across southern Lebanon, and left soils polluted with heavy metals, while the apparent use of cluster munitions left the landscape littered with unexploded bombs.
Hisham Younes, the founder and president of Green Southerners, a Lebanese environmental group, said the repeated attacks on southern Lebanon’s ecosystem would have “cumulative, complex and deep impacts”.
“This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil capable of better absorbing or accommodating such impacts,” Younes told the Guardian. “It occurs over land and vegetation already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues and other contaminants resulting from sustained bombardment.”
Israel had deliberately targeted agricultural land, including beekeepers, Younes said. “The use of glyphosate compounds adds another layer of pressure on insect communities and pollinators, with direct and immediate repercussions for an already devastated agricultural sector.”
Such tactics were in line with a “legacy of colonial practices” that informed the methods used by Israeli armed forces. “The very concept of ‘scorched’ or ‘dead’ land is rooted in a colonial tradition of warfare,” Younes said. “Israel has long relied on approaches characterised by long-term destructive effects, whether on landscapes and natural systems, on ecological features, or on the systematic undermining of the conditions necessary for sustaining life and livelihoods.
“Within this continuum, the recent chemical spraying cannot be seen as an isolated incident. It forms part of an evolving pattern in which environmental harm is cumulative and increasingly difficult to reverse.”
