"‘Protect the climate for whom?’: Palestinians highlight Gaza at Cop29"

Advocates and officials argue that consequences of Israeli siege are inextricably linked to tackling the climate crisis [...]

Some advocates have called the crisis in Gaza an “ecocide”, saying the war has made its ecosystems unliveable. “What’s going on in Gaza is completely killing all the elements of life,” said Abeer Butmeh, a coordinator of the Palestinian NGOs Network and Friends of the Earth Palestine who had travelled to Cop29 from the West Bank.

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court sought an arrest warrant this week for leaders of Hamas and Israel over actions taken since October 2023. Israeli military forces have killed tens of thousands of people in the region while wreaking havoc on infrastructure and ecosystems.

More than 80,000 explosives have been dropped on the area, leaving three-quarters of agricultural land damaged and already exhausted water systems contaminated, Butmeh said. “It’s a catastrophic situation,” she said.

The majority of Gaza’s access to resources has been cut off by Israel, leaving the entire population of about 2.2 million people with crisis levels of food insecurity, research has shown. Energy is also scarce. [...]

“By cutting off food, cutting off energy, cutting off water, that means the killing of all people in Gaza,” Butmeh said.

For her, the destruction in Gaza is deeply tied to the flow of fossil fuels. She and others have been calling for a fuel embargo on Israel. It is a demand that has featured heavily in protests and press conferences throughout the halls of Cop29. [...]

A Palestinian organiser and PhD student who asked to remain anonymous told the Guardian: “We have three main demands. For countries to stop selling energy to Israel, for countries to stop purchasing gas from Israel, and for companies to withdraw from participation in the extraction of gas from illegally occupied Palestinian waters.”

On the first point, organisers are asking governments to follow the example of Colombia, which ended coal sales to Israel in June 2024. The country was previously Israel’s largest source of coal imports.

“We’re calling for debilitating them the way they’re debilitating our society,” said Mohammed Usrof, a Gazan research assistant at the Institute for Palestine Studies who is leading a team bringing four Palestinian young negotiators to COP29. Usrof has lost 21 relatives in Gaza since the beginning of the recent onslaught.

Other countries have made similar commitments – Turkey, for instance, said in May it was adopting a total trade ban with Israel. But it has reportedly still allowed oil to flow to the country through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

The anti-fossil fuel advocacy group Oil Change International recently found that 28% of the crude oil supplied to Israel between 21 October 2023 and 12 July 2024 came from Azerbaijan, the nation hosting this year’s UN climate summit. Butmah asked: “If they’re fuelling the genocide, how can they talk about climate justice?”

A particular target for the activists is the energy firm BP, the main operator and largest shareholder of the BTC pipeline. (BTC’s minority partners include TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil.) The company also produces some of the Caspian Sea crude oil delivered by the pipeline to Israel, together with an Azerbaijani national oil company.

“BP is one of the largest corporate suppliers of oil to Israel,” said Sadie DeCost, an organiser with the NGO Tipping Point UK.

The Guardian has contacted BP, Exxon, Total and the Israeli government for comment.

In March, a UN human rights expert said Israel had carried out acts of genocide in Gaza and should be placed under an arms embargo. The genocide convention of 1948 requires UN parties to employ all reasonably available means to prevent genocide in another state as far as possible.

A September investigation by the Energy Embargo for Palestine campaign indicated that oil transported via the BTC pipeline was refined into jet fuel for warplanes used by the Israel Defense Forces. Salhab argued this meant countries should, under the genocide convention, stop supplying Israel with fuel. [...]