Access to a Clean Environment Israel, as an occupying power, has a duty under the GCIV to “ensure and maintain public health and hygiene in the occupied territory.”199 However, Israel has both ignored its obligations and instituted discriminatory policies in this regard that creates a coercive environment and leads to the forcible transfer of the occupied population. Israel is polluting and damaging the environment, thereby causing serious harm to drinking water, air quality, land fertility and public health. This pollution has forced people to leave their residential or work places. For example, the Israeli private agrochemicals company Geshuri, near Tulkarem, produced so much industrial waste that it affected the whole surrounding locality, causing air pollution and serious health problems including disproportionately high rates of cancer, asthma, eye and respiratory anomalies.200 As a result, this locality is considered uninhabitable, and the nearest residences have been almost completely abandoned.201 Waste Management in West Bank Israel uses the West Bank as a location in which to dump its waste, much of which is deemed hazardous. Types of waste dumped in the West Bank include solid waste, construction waste, and wastewater. The sources of this waste are not only the Israeli colonies inside the West Bank, but also Israel itself, which transfers its waste into the West Bank.202 Serious damage to the Palestinian environment has occurred, as most of this waste is not treated and is left in unauthorized and/or inappropriate landfills or in Palestinian villages and towns. One example is the Qalqilyah landfill. Though now closed, the waste in the landfill is untreated and is thus still polluting the surrounding environment. This landfill is located on top of an aquifer and is close to a field of olives which have “been designated as unmarketable, because of an unspecified risk of contamination.”203 This is only one example of the destructive results of Israel’s waste management policy. 199 GCIV, art. 56, supra note 5. 200 Al Haq, Environmental injustice in occupied Palestinian territory, 2015, 24, available at: http://www. alhaq.org/publications/Environmental.Injustice.Report.En.pdf [hereinafter Al Haq, Environmental injustice]. 201 Ibid., 25. 202 Mel Frykberg, “Israel treats West Bank as its garbage dump,” The Electronic Intifada, 18 May 2009, available at: https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-treats-west-bank-its-garbage-dump/8235 [accessed 22 August 2017] [hereinafter, Frykberg, “West Bank as garbage dump”]. 203 Al Haq, Environmental injustice 36, supra note 201. 53