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In the eyes of Israeli authorities, Palestinians in Gaza have it “too good”. Three years into Israel’s genocide, the survivors have been pushed into ever smaller areas of land amid rubble, rubbish and disease, without adequate shelter or sanitation. Apparently, even that is too much.
In late September, a foul smell spread across Gaza City overnight. At first, residents searched for its source around them, wondering whether it was coming from a toilet or even one of their sleeping children. Then reports of the same stench began coming in from across the city. Israeli aircraft had reportedly dropped hundreds of packets containing a foul-smelling substance over populated areas.
“Today, all of us in Gaza City woke up to a foul, rotten smell in the truest sense of the word … Israeli occupation drones were spraying this foul stench to pollute the air. Even the air?” said one witness to AJ+.
Israel has, in fact, spent nearly two decades weaponising foul smells against Palestinians.
Skunk water, the leading Israeli olfactory ordnance now believed to be in use in Gaza, was developed in 2004 by the Israeli company Odortec in partnership with Israel Police’s Technological Development Department, and first deployed against Palestinian protesters in Nilin in 2008. It is classified as a “scent-based non-lethal weapon” for crowd control and can be fired from water cannon or dropped from drones.
From Nilin, its use spread across the occupied West Bank. It became a regular feature of demonstrations in Bilin, Kafr Qaddum and Nabi Saleh, where Israeli forces repeatedly used it against Palestinians protesting settlements, land seizures and restrictions on movement. In 2011, Israeli forces fired tear gas and skunk water on unarmed demonstrators who had attended the burial of a 28-year-old killed by the Israeli army in Nabi Saleh and were then making their way to the village spring that had been “appropriated by the neighbouring settlement, Halamish”. Similar incidents were reported there in 2012 and 2013.
The practice soon spread beyond those West Bank villages. In 2013, activists demonstrating against the closure of Shuhada Street in Hebron and journalists covering the protest were sprayed with the putrid liquid. The following year, Israeli police drove skunk trucks through Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, spraying homes, streets and schools. In at-Tur, four schools were hit, forcing some 4,500 pupils to stay home because of the smell.
By 2018, Israel was also deploying it from the air. During the Great March of Return, the Israeli military used the Shoko drone to douse Palestinian protesters in Gaza with the foul-smelling liquid from a payload of plastic bags.
For Israeli authorities, its usefulness goes well beyond crowd control. Sure, spray it on a protest and people scatter. But spray it over streets, homes and neighbourhoods, and it becomes a tool for making Palestinian space itself unliveable.
That goes some way towards explaining Israel’s enduring enthusiasm for skunk water. There is another reason, too: Israel sells to the world the methods it has developed to control Palestinians.
When skunk water was first deployed in 2008, it was reported that Israeli police had “high hopes of turning it into a commercial venture and selling it to law-enforcement agencies overseas”. Superintendent David Ben Harosh even went on air hugging a “litre bottle of dirty, green liquid” and boasting: “It’s totally harmless, you can even drink it.”
Its use against Palestinians – whom Israel has long characterised as a symbol of pathological evil – also feeds the country’s global reputation as a pioneer of counterinsurgency and policing technologies. Every deployment offers another demonstration of Israeli expertise in controlling the population it presents as uniquely dangerous.
By then, Israel had already begun exporting it. In 2007, Beit Alfa Technologies supplied skunk water to the South African Police Service along with “water cannons and riot-control gear”. These were later used against demonstrators during the Fees Must Fall protests in 2015.
In 2017, India’s Central Reserve Police Force tested skunk water for crowd control in places including Jammu and Kashmir. The Who Profits Research Center has also said it was approached by a company seeking help contacting Odortec to buy the liquid for sale to Colombian police.
In the United States, Mistral Security supplies skunk water, claiming that “the stench of Skunk immediately causes individuals and crowds to cease their activities while allowing Law Enforcement to gain control with minimum injuries and casualties”.
The company’s marketing makes the connection to Palestine unusually explicit: its website uses a photograph of Israeli forces deploying skunk water against Palestinians in the West Bank. The Palestinians subjected to the weapon become part of the proof that it works.
Following the 2014 Ferguson protests, Mistral supplied skunk water to several US police departments. This included the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department in Missouri, which acquired the liquid in 2015 following the protests in Ferguson.
A Quartz report on the shipment to Missouri captured what makes the weapon attractive. “The poisoning of a place”, it observed, can destroy people’s willingness to “reside, congregate, protest, or even document a location” until it is cleaned away. It described skunk water as potentially “a system for maintaining new apartheids”.
What Israel sells, then, is more than a foul-smelling liquid. Skunk water comes wrapped in the reputation Israel has built through decades of controlling Palestinians: a state presented as uniquely experienced in suppressing unrest, countering insurgency and dealing with populations cast as dangerous. Palestinians are central to that brand. Their repression demonstrates the technology; their demonisation helps justify the expertise built around controlling them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
