War Dust and Collateral Inhalation: Israel Breathes in Gaza’s Dust

A Forensic Study of the Self-Inflicted Consequences of Modern Warfare

Gaza is suffering the most intense bombing, per capita, of anywhere on earth, ever.

Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds of thousands.¹

It is impossible to overstate the effects of the abominable bombing war on Gazans, their lives, their families, their health, and their communities.

What has escaped attention up until now is the undeniable environmental and health effects of the bombing of Gazans on Israelis, as well as on citizens of neighboring states, and the potential harm to U.S. military personnel in the region.

A study of explosion physics based on declassified Department of Defense data, as well as blast temperature data and consequent emissions; a review of wind patterns, together with publicly available data of health effects from 9/11, as well as data gathered from U.S. veterans of the Persian Gulf War, yield a shocking conclusion.

Israel, in executing the unprecedented bombing attack on Gaza, is, in effect, bombing itself, with grave consequences for the public health of its people.² What is being visited upon Gaza does not stay in Gaza.

The sustained bombing of Gaza pulverizes stone, heavy metals, and the human body. The vaporizing of human beings under extreme heat and pressure combines with dust, water vapor, and metallic particles the size of microns, all blasted upwards, aerosolized, wind-driven across borders, into Israel and surrounding countries.³

The unlimited bombing of Gaza has created an unparalleled ecological and biomedical feedback loop. Israel exhales death in Gaza and inhales the Gaza it has vaporized.

Israel, in bombing neighboring Gaza, is breathing in its own fallout, along with the vaporized remains of its declared enemies. The external consequences of violence becomes internalized. The substance of the oppressed communes with the oppressor.

On a clinical level, breathing in bioaerosols can compromise human immune systems.⁴ Breathing in ultrafine particles from non-biological war dust can cross the blood-brain barrier and contribute to neurodegenerative disease.⁵

Israel and the Palestinians share a common atmosphere. They inhale the same war dust, from bomb materials, carbon soot, and the fine particle remains of vaporized Gazans.

Human cremation occurs at temperatures between 1,400°F and 1,800°F.⁶ The blast temperatures of the bombs identified as being dropped on Gaza—MK-84 bombs: 4,496°F; GBU-39s: 4,892°F; BLU-109s: 3,632°F—far exceed this range.⁷ In comparison, blast furnaces used to melt steel operate at 2,500°F to 2,800°F.⁸

People at the epicenter of such bombings in Gaza are instantly turned into dust. This is a factor confounding the determination of exactly how many people have perished in Gaza since October 2023. How can an accurate body count be achieved if bodies have been turned to smoke and ash?

Let’s look at 9/11. The total confirmed dead: 2,753. Almost 40% of the victims were never identified, as their bodies were fragmented or vaporized, reduced to dust.⁹

When a bomb hits its target—for example, a tent city—the high-temperature explosion can vaporize a person so thoroughly that microscopic particles of DNA and loose molecules are suspended in air, mingling with dust and smoke as bioaerosols.¹⁰

These biologicals—DNA and fat in human tissue—turn to carbon, black dust, and smoke. The minerals of bones and teeth, skeletal dust, go airborne. Fragments of cells can float in the air, bubbles holding fat, bone, and broken DNA strands travel with the wind and are breathed in dozens of miles from the blast site.¹¹

It is not only the superheat that destroys the human body. The explosive force of a bomb, in terms of pounds per square inch (psi), can produce vaporization at the blast site, an impact equivalent to a plane plunging into the earth at high speed.¹²

As 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, the matter destroyed takes a different form, as toxic pollutants carried aloft in gas, dust, vapor, and particulates.

Specifically, toxic quantities of cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, and arsenic are released into the air, together with dioxins, furans, PCBs, (polychlorinated biphenyls); PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds).¹³

One calculation indicates that 100,000 tons of bombs, exploded in a densely populated area of Gaza, can generate between 800,000 to 1.2 million tons of pollution.¹⁴

Add to this the dust of Gazans’ human remains and you have extreme airborne consequences carried by the wind, directly into Israel, particularly the central and northern regions, and far beyond.

There are relevant comparisons for the health effects of a tremendous explosion in an urban area. A month after 9/11, people in Manhattan began to develop chronic coughs.

A longitudinal study of members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) revealed that after six months, firemen began to suffer from chronic bronchitis; others saw the onset of pulmonary fibrosis.¹⁵

Two years after 9/11, a higher incidence of thyroid, prostate, breast, and other cancers arose among those exposed to 9/11 contaminants. Early-onset neurodegenerative, Alzheimer’s-type symptoms presented after five years or longer.¹⁶

Based on epidemiological data from studies of those near the people and buildings destroyed on 9/11, certain health effects can be anticipated in Israel.

The people of Sderot, Netivot, Be’er Sheva—all within a short distance of Gaza—are at high risk of long-term health effects of the bombing. Ashkelon and Tel Aviv have been exposed to environmental consequences, as has northern Israel and even Jordan.

While Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection operates air-monitoring stations at sites proximate to Gaza, it would be instructive, given the intensity of the bombing, to see if the effects of war-related pollution are being fully disclosed to the Israeli public.¹⁷

Given the unprecedented levels of bombing in Gaza, the types of bombs used, their explosive power, the extent of physical destruction, the extraordinary number of casualties, the creation of large plumes of black smoke containing the genetic material of burned and vaporized Gazans, the people of Israel—on the other side of the Gaza boundary—will likely experience increased levels of respiratory illness, asthma-like and other pulmonary diseases, and a sharp increase in cancer as a direct result of being exposed to toxic airborne substances present at a microscopic level.¹⁸

Added to this direct hazard is the ongoing recirculation of wind across the vast hellscape to which Gaza has been reduced. That, too, will sweep up and redistribute the contaminants from the over 50 million tons of debris from the land of Gaza to the land of Israel.

At this point, the calamity which has befallen Gaza as a result of incessant bombing will visit, in various forms and degrees of harm, southern and central Israel, western Jordan, the northeast Sinai Peninsula, northern Egypt (Delta and Cairo), Lebanon, Cyprus, southwestern Syria, northwestern Saudi Arabia, southeastern Turkey, Crete, Greece, Sicily, and Malta. Additionally, sea spray can carry aerosolized particles clear across the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁹

The United States has a substantial number of Naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean, including two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, as well as numerous other assault ships.²⁰

U.S. military installations are present at Incirlik, Turkey, Naples, Italy, Cyprus, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. All face “war dust” pollution hazards as a result of the bombing of Gaza.²¹

I know well the adverse health consequences suffered by US servicemen and women who served in the Persian Gulf War, 1990–1991.

Veterans of that war came to my congressional office complaining of constant pain, neurological, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal and respiratory symptoms, all of which were ignored or covered up by the Department of Defense.

As a Member of Congress, over the objections of the Department of Defense, I took up the cause of veterans who suffered what came to be known as Gulf War Illness, a multi-symptom condition still affecting, to this very day, nearly 245,000 veterans of the Persian Gulf War.²²

Bernie Sanders and I worked together in Congress to obtain funding for research into GWI, which is now a medically recognized, war-related condition.²³

When you see the measurable, catastrophic effect which war environments can have on those who serve, and the measurable catastrophic effect of those proximate to the 9/11 attacks, and the indefensible obliteration bombing of Gaza and its people, you may come to an understanding of the wholly fallacious notion of the containment of war and why I assert Israel is bombing itself.

The bombing of Gaza has created a human health crisis which cannot be ignored any longer.

There must be an immediate cease-fire on humanitarian and ecological bases.

• The UN must urgently address the collapse of the Palestinian public health system, including the implications of the war for respiratory diseases and cancers among survivors.

• The UN must lead a Transboundary Environmental and Human Health Assessment of the Immediate and Long-Term Implications of War Dust, which will include transboundary assessments of the toxic environmental effects of the war.

• Monitoring stations must be set up. The people of the world have a right to know what is in the air they breathe.

International humanitarian and environmental law must, at last, be enforced.

UN representatives must determine a path forward.

Israel and the United States must consider the far-reaching consequences of the decision to attack and bomb the people of another country.

The tortured mindset which licenses the extinction of Gazans is now a spectre haunting the entire world, with its ghoulish designs on Iran. I will explore that approaching cataclysm in a future column.

Human rights and compassion are not considerations in bombing Gazans. Perhaps enlightened self-preservation can be introduced as a means to stop the bombing, once and for all.

The war against Gazans must end, and perhaps through the suffering of Gazans, and understanding the regional and global health impact of bombing, we may understand why it is time to call an end to all wars.

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Footnotes:

1. UNOSAT Gaza Strip 7th Comprehensive Damage Assessment, May 31, 2024.

2. DDESB Blast Effects Computer, DoD, June 11, 2018.

3. Milgram, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963.

4. Oberdörster et al., Particle and Fibre Toxicology, 2005.

5. Calderón-Garcidueñas et al., Brain and Cognition, 2008.

6. CANA Position Statement, 2022.

7. Department of the Army, Military Explosives, TM 9-1300-214, 1990.

8. World Steel Association, LCA Eco-profile, 2023.

9. NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner, 2023.

10. Møller et al., Journal of Heredity, 2013.

11. Block & Calderón-Garcidueñas, Trends in Neurosciences, 2009.

12. DoDM 4145.26, DoD, March 13, 2008.

13. UNEP, From Conflict to Peacebuilding, 2009.

14. NATO RTO-TR-071, Urban Operations 2020, 2024.

15. FDNY WTC Health Program, 15-Year Report, 2007.

16. Mount Sinai WTC Health Registry, 2021.

17. Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection, Air Quality Reports, 2024.

18. WHO, Health Effects of PM, 2013.

19. EUMETSAT, Dust Transport Models, 2023.

20. USNI News, Carrier Deployments, June 2024.

21. Wikipedia, U.S. Overseas Military Bases, 2024.

22. VA Gulf War Research Reports, 2008–2024.

23. CDMRP Gulf War Illness Research Program, ongoing since 2006.