Lebanon has accused Israel of spraying a herbicide linked to cancer on farmland in the south of the country as a \u201chealth crime\u201d that would threaten food security and farmers\u2019 livelihoods.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned what he called \u201can environmental and health crime\u201d and a violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and he vowed to take \u201call necessary legal and diplomatic measures to confront this aggression\u201d.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s government did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> as \u201cprobably carcinogenic to humans\u201d.<\/p>\n One of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In a joint statement, Lebanon\u2019s ministries of agriculture and the environment said some samples showed glyphosate concentrations \u201c20 and 30 times higher than normal [use]\u201d. Its use would, they said, \u201cdamage vegetation in the targeted areas, with direct repercussions on agricultural production, soil fertility and ecological balance.<\/p>\n The statement continued: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> and incendiary bombs that burned farmland, olive groves and forests across southern Lebanon, and left soils polluted with heavy metals<\/a>, while the apparent use of cluster munitions left the landscape littered with unexploded bombs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hisham Younes, the founder and president of Green Southerners, a Lebanese environmental group, said the repeated attacks on southern Lebanon\u2019s ecosystem would have \u201ccumulative, complex and deep impacts\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThis spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil capable of better absorbing or accommodating such impacts,\u201d Younes told the Guardian. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Israel had deliberately targeted agricultural land, including beekeepers, Younes said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Such tactics were in line with a \u201clegacy of colonial practices\u201d that informed the methods used by Israeli armed forces. \u201cThe very concept of \u2018scorched\u2019 or \u2018dead\u2019 land is rooted in a colonial tradition of warfare,\u201d Younes said. \u201cIsrael 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWithin 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lebanon has accused Israel of spraying a herbicide linked to cancer on farmland in the south of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-275958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}