ANTALYA, Turkey — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the podium at the United Nations COP31 climate summit on Wednesday to accuse Israel of committing "ecocide" alongside genocide in the Gaza Strip, demanding an immediate end to humanitarian blockades.
Cadence shifted inside the summit hall the moment he spoke.
Speaking before assembled heads of state and international envoys in the coastal city of Antalya, Erdogan expanded the diplomatic offensive against Israel’s protracted assault, insisting that the ecological ruin inflicted on Palestinian territory has reached permanent, catastrophic proportions. The audience responded with sustained applause. Israel, which was not invited to participate in the summit, struck back within hours.
What has taken place in Gaza is not only a genocide, but it is also an ecocide. Centuries-old olive trees have been cut down. The soil and water have been polluted in Gaza, and cities in Gaza have been turned into enormous piles of rubble.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey
The Turkish leader underscored that Gaza’s pulverized infrastructure has left hundreds of thousands defenseless against the elements. Torrential rains and sudden winter flash floods recently ripped through displaced persons camps across the strip, drowning tens of thousands of makeshift tents. Just days earlier, a collapsed sand embankment crushed a shelter, killing at least four people and stripping surviving families of potable water and dry ground.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry fired a blistering retort on social media, accusing the Turkish head of state of cynically co-opting an international environmental summit to amplify anti-Israel propaganda while sheltering senior Hamas operatives on Turkish soil. Israeli officials emphasized that their offensive began only after Hamas-led fighters stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages.
The war had to happen, Israeli officials maintained. Hamas started it.
"Those who truly care about Gaza should demand that Hamas disarm so reconstruction can begin," the Israeli Foreign Ministry stated, arguing that Hamas deliberately embedded military assets within civilian centers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier branded Turkey a "superspreader of antisemitic lies" during his address to the UN General Assembly.
Yet the environmental devastation documented across Gaza extends far beyond rhetorical sparring. A comprehensive United Nations Environment Programme assessment revealed that three years of bombardment and siege have obliterated the enclave's natural life-support systems, contaminating ground aquifers and smothering productive soils under millions of tons of pulverized concrete.
The figures paint an unsparing portrait of systemic collapse:
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tree Crops | 97% Damaged | Centuries-old olive groves destroyed | |||
| Annual Crops | 82% Damaged | Farmland inaccessible or contaminated | |||
| Shrubland | 95% Damaged | Natural ground cover decimated | |||
| Fallow & Grassland | 89% Damaged | Soil compacted, buried by debris |
"As of now, our families only have 3% of cropland to use, and that is assuming it’s distributed across 2 million Palestinians," said Mohammed Usrof, co-founder and executive director of the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy. He stressed that silencing discussion around ecological collapse directly undercuts the Palestinian population's ability to survive on their ancestral land.
Bombing runs also eliminated wastewater treatment plants, municipal dumps, and water desalination stations. Untreated sewage now pours directly into shallow coastal trenches, contaminating Gaza’s shoreline and poisoning traditional fishing grounds with heavy munitions residues.
"For people in Gaza, this translates into severely limited access to safe drinking water, greater exposure to waterborne diseases and toxic substances, deepening food insecurity and the loss of livelihoods dependent on agriculture and fishing," stated Ghiwa Nakat, executive director at Greenpeace MENA, warning that soil decontamination alone will demand decades of international intervention.
More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory offensive, according to official tallies by Gaza health authorities, who note that women and children constitute nearly half of all registered deaths. While Israel fiercely denies accusations of genocide—dismissing findings by a UN-backed panel of independent experts as biased—humanitarian shipments permitted through border checkpoints remain a fraction of pre-war quotas.
Diplomatic friction is set to intensify as COP31 negotiations proceed through the week in Antalya, where participating delegations are scheduled to draft working resolutions on environmental accountability in conflict zones ahead of the summit's final ministerial session.
| Marine & Fisheries | Fully Compromised | Munitions and untreated sewage runoff |