Gendered Logics of Environmental Warfare: Environmental Destruction in the Gaza War (2023–2025)

Environmental warfare, the deliberate modification or destruction of the environment and environmental infrastructure for political or military purposes, has existed for centuries and has often been normalized as an unavoidable dimension of war. Much EW scholarship explains environmental harm primarily through strategic and tactical utility (for example, area denial, coercion through livelihood disruption, or economic attrition). This instrumental emphasis cannot fully explain how environmental destruction becomes a legitimate and normalized military option, especially when it produces long-term effects for health, food and water access, livelihoods, and post-war recovery. The perspective that remains largely absent from this debate is gender. This absence is striking given that both feminist security studies and feminist environmental research have long analyzed the gendered foundations of violence, domination, and environmental degradation. This paper advances a gendered analysis of environmental warfare by putting feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist environmental studies (FES) into direct dialogue. While these literatures have developed largely in parallel, both emphasize how power operates through gendered logics of control, protection, mastery, and rationality, and how these logics are institutionalized in modern military and technocratic systems. Bridging these approaches allows for a more systematic understanding of how environmental destruction becomes thinkable, legitimate, and routine within military practice. Empirically, the paper examines environmental warfare during the Gaza war (2023–2025) as a critical case. It focuses on two distinct practices conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): the flooding of Hamas tunnels with water and the large-scale bulldozing of agricultural land to create an expanded military perimeter. Both involve deliberate environmental modification, yet they differ significantly in visibility, temporality, scale, and justificatory framing. These contrasts make it possible to analyze how different forms of environmental harm are justified, and rendered morally acceptable. Methodologically, the study adopts a feminist interpretivist research design that treats the military as a site of meaning-making. It draws on semi-structured expert interviews and interpretive analysis of military statements, documents, and soldier testimonies. The analysis traces how gendered logics shape the justification and enactment of environmental destruction across different operational contexts. The paper contributes to environmental warfare and feminist scholarship by reconceptualizing environmental destruction as a gendered form of violence. By bridging feminist security and feminist environmental research, it offers a framework for understanding how militaries rationalize environmental harm.