Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran: War crimes Against the Environment and Climate

When we talk about war, we typically rehearse several perspectives—geopolitical tensions and power struggles; military tactics and battlefield outcomes; economic costs and disruptions to markets and supply chains. Violations of the norms of armed conflict and war crimes are approached from the perspective of international law. A crucial humanitarian perspective foregrounds violence and human suffering and reminds us that war is, above all, a human catastrophe.

Yet wars are also profound environmental and climate catastrophes. Military flights and ground operations, bombing, damaged infrastructure and destroyed buildings, burning oil fields, and devastated and polluted forests, water, and farmland generate large volumes of greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution. They impair the environment and its ecosystem services—harboring biodiversity, supplying water and food, enabling nutrient cycling, regulating weather, and sequestering carbon. This environmental damage stalls development, increases poverty, vulnerability, and scarcity, and heightens health risks. With their tremendous costs, wars divert public resources away from health, education, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Contemporary wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran are not only human but also environmental and climate catastrophes. They demonstrate that war is not external to the environmental crisis but rather its most extreme manifestation. The tragedy of war lies in the destruction of the environment, the acceleration of the climate crisis, and the interruption of efforts to address it.

Ukraine: Energy Terror Warfare

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, part of his neo-imperial effort to halt the country’s democratization and alignment with the EU, was initially conceived as a rapid offensive aimed at capturing Kyiv, toppling the government, and installing a pro-Russian regime. After this strategy failed, Russia shifted to a war of attrition, combining ground offensives in the East and Southeast with the systematic targeting of critical infrastructure, most notably the energy system.

Since the start of the war, more than 60 large-scale strike campaigns have been documented, targeting power plants, substations, transmission networks, dams, and oil and gas facilities. By early 2026, Ukraine had lost more than three quarters of its pre-war electricity generation capacity, with most thermal power plants damaged or destroyed. According to the IEA, Ukraine is now dependent on its three remaining operational nuclear power plants. Attacks on the energy system have produced cascading effects across water supply, heating, healthcare, transport, and communication, imposing sustained and severe hardship on civilians.

This form of energy terror warfare, which qualifies as a war crime, has been intensified by Russia during the winter months and seeks to destroy the economic and social foundations of Ukrainian society while eroding people’s resilience by making it impossible to meet basic needs. During the harsh winter—when nighttime temperatures in Kyiv in January and February consistently hovered around −10°C or lower—millions of Ukrainians had heating and electricity for only a few hours per day, or in some periods none at all for several consecutive days. This hardship unfolds alongside an enormous human toll and violence documented in countless reports as violations of international humanitarian and human rights law and war crimes—executions, torture, sexual violence on the battlefield; abducted children; and civilians injured, displaced, and stripped of security, community, and belonging.

Adding to these immense harms, the war also carries dramatic climate consequences. Emissions are generated on a vast scale from the burning of diesel and kerosene in tanks and fighter jets; the production and deployment of drones and munitions; detonations; fires at oil depots and refineries; and the dramatic increase in forest fires in war zones. Attacks on energy infrastructure release greenhouse gases, including highly potent sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆), used in high-voltage electrical systems, which persists in the atmosphere for millennia and has an extremely high global warming potential (about 23,500 times that of CO₂ over 100 years). Dysfunctional energy networks force reliance on diesel generators and other carbon-intensive emergency sources, further increasing emissions. An Ecoaction report estimates total war-related emissions in the hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂—237 million tonnes, to be precise—equivalent to the annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia combined. Postwar reconstruction of Ukraine, if it occurs in the near term, risks locking the country onto a path of carbon-intensive, extractive development of critical minerals demanded by the USA and the EU.

These climate harms form part of a multi-dimensional and ever-worsening environmental crisis involving widespread contamination of air, agricultural land, forests, and water with heavy metals, toxic chemicals, mines, and particulate matter resulting from bombing, demolitions, and fires. The scale and severity of this environmental destruction have led some to describe the war as ecocide—a concept not yet codified in international law but increasingly used to capture forms of environmental devastation of exceptional magnitude, for example by Darya Tsymbalyuk in her book Ecocide in Ukraine. The catastrophic explosion and subsequent collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 exemplify the devastating environmental effects of a single wartime incident. Caused by a deliberate explosion, the collapse submerged more than 620 km² of territory, inundated dozens of settlements, displaced tens of thousands of people, destroyed agricultural land and water and river transport infrastructure, and devastated natural habitats and cultural sites. It deprived over 700,000 people of their primary source of drinking water, disrupted irrigation for tens of thousands of hectares of farmland, and washed toxic sediments, heavy metals, and agrochemicals downstream into the Black Sea. There, these pollutants compounded the deadly impacts of mines, explosions, and acoustic pollution from sonar, contributing to mass mortality among dolphins and porpoises.

Gaza: Total Demolition

The current war in the Gaza Strip is the latest chapter in a recurring cycle of conflict between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas. It escalated dramatically after the October 2023 attack by Hamas militants, which killed around 1,200 people and involved the taking of hostages. Israel’s objective of dismantling Hamas has since been pursued through extensive aerial bombardment, ground operations, and a blockade of Gaza that has restricted electricity, water, fuel, and essential supplies. Targeting tunnel networks, weapons depots, and command centers in one of the most densely populated territories in the world—approximately 2.3 million people within 365 km²—has resulted in one of the most destructive urban military campaigns of the 21st century, comparable to the devastation of Aleppo or Raqqa during the Syrian civil war, or Grozny during the Chechen wars.

Israel’s current offensive has turned Gaza into rubble. Satellite monitoring and UN damage assessments indicate that over 80 percent of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Gaza City, Rafah, and Khan Yunis have experienced near-total destruction in some neighborhoods, including homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and other essential infrastructure. Humanitarian reporting by the United Nations OCHA and UNRWA indicates that approximately 1.9 million people—around 90 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been internally displaced, many multiple times, with vast numbers rendered homeless. At least 72,000–75,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war, primarily Palestinians, according to OCHA, and the conflict has produced some of the highest recorded death tolls among children, journalists, and health and humanitarian workers in any recent conflict worldwide. This form of total urban demolition warfare has been criticized by human rights organizations and UN bodies as constituting crimes against humanity and war crimes, including collective punishment and the unlawful deprivation of basic necessities as a method of warfare.

Unsurprisingly, these tactics of total destruction have produced profound and potentially irreversible ecological damage. A UNEP report assessing the environmental impact of the conflict in Gaza estimates that for every square metre of the Gaza Strip there are now over 107 kilograms of debris, totaling approximately 39 million tonnes generated by the conflict. Dust, unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and human remains in the rubble pose severe health risks. Water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are almost entirely defunct, and sewage contaminates beaches, coastal waters, soil, and freshwater with pathogens, microplastics, and hazardous chemicals. The destruction of irrigation infrastructure has accelerated soil degradation and damaged Gaza’s already fragile ecosystems—including the coastal dune strip, marine biodiversity, and the Wadi Gaza wetlands—while heightening the risk of long-term desertification. The destruction of solar panels and shortages of cooking gas have forced families to burn wood, plastic, and waste, generating additional emissions and polluting the air. The atmosphere is further burdened by large volumes of carbon dioxide emissions, driven by military logistics, including cargo flights supplying Israel, as well as aerial bombardment and ground operations. According to available estimates, the carbon footprint of the first fifteen months of the war exceeded 32 million tonnes of CO₂—more than the annual emissions of over one hundred countries worldwide.

Iran: Take the Oil or Burn It

Decades of U.S.–Iran hostility—rooted in the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis, nuclear disputes, and Iran’s regional support for armed groups—erupted into open conflict on 28 February 2026. U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated (and widely considered unlawful) strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile and defense systems, and political leadership. Iran responded by moving to obstruct the Strait of Hormuz, launching missiles and drones at Israel and other targets across the Middle East, and attacking commercial shipping.

It remains uncertain how the war will unfold and whether it will end within the timeframe that the Trump administration has at times suggested. Control over, and disruption of, oil infrastructure and trade have become central elements of the conflict. Trump has openly and repeatedly stated his desire to “take the oil in Iran,” including the seizure of key export hubs such as Kharg Island. This echoes U.S. tactics in Venezuela and reflects a broader foreign policy logic that treats energy resources in other countries not as sovereign assets but as entitlements subject to appropriation under conditions of conflict. He has also repeatedly threatened to “completely devastate” and “obliterate” Iran’s critical energy infrastructure—including oil wells, power plants, freshwater facilities, and export terminals—if a deal is not reached swiftly, a strategy of resource destruction reminiscent of Russia’s approach in Ukraine.

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas flow—has produced one of the most consequential disruptions to the global energy system in recent history. It has effectively halted maritime traffic, triggered supply shortages, driven sharp price increases, raised insurance and transport costs, and forced the rerouting of shipments along longer and more expensive routes. The resulting shortage of oil and gas has compelled many Asian states, heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports from the Persian Gulf, to turn to alternative energy sources, often including more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal.

What is already evident is that this war constitutes a climate tragedy. According to available estimates (Earth.Org), the first fourteen days of the conflict generated emissions exceeding 5 million tonnes of CO₂—approximately one sixth of Slovakia’s annual emissions in 2024. Airstrikes, missile launches, naval deployments, and the logistics of modern warfare produce vast quantities of direct emissions. For example, a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II consumes approximately 5,600 to 6,500 liters of kerosene during a single combat sortie, emitting around 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide—roughly equivalent to the lifetime emissions of a conventional passenger car. Attacks on oil and gas infrastructure release large volumes of CO₂, methane, and other pollutants through fires, leaks, and explosions, while also emitting toxic substances that contaminate air, soil, and water.

More broadly, the war reinforces and prolongs global dependence on fossil fuel systems by re-centering oil security as a strategic priority and diverting political and financial resources away from decarbonization and climate adaptation. In this sense, the conflict does not merely generate emissions in the short term; it structurally deepens the conditions driving the climate crisis.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.