As the U.S.–Israeli military campaign against Iran grinds into its seventh month, a parallel crisis is unfolding beneath the smoke and rubble — one measured not in casualties but in contaminated water, poisoned air, and ecosystems quietly collapsing under the weight of industrial-scale destruction. Researchers and environmental monitors are documenting what may become one of the most significant cases of war-driven ecological devastation in modern history, even as a U.S.-directed satellite blackout limits the full picture of what has been lost.
300 Incidents, 12 Countries, and a Blocked View from Space
By March 10, 2026 — just weeks after the conflict began in February — the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) had already identified over 300 incidents of potential environmental harm stemming from Operation Epic Fury, spanning 12 countries including Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, Cyprus, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Azerbaijan. Of those incidents, 232 had been assessed for environmental risk, covering everything from military airbases to oil refineries to hospitals.
CEOBS concluded that all parties to the conflict appeared to have targeted environmentally risky facilities, including oil infrastructure and water desalination plants. The assessment relied on a combination of social media footage, traditional media reporting, and satellite imagery — the last of which has become increasingly difficult to obtain.
Major commercial satellite companies, including Planet Labs, restricted or delayed the publication of their Middle East imagery at the request of the U.S. government. While the stated rationale has centered on obscuring damage to U.S. military installations in the region, the effect has been to hinder independent environmental monitoring at precisely the moment it is most needed. Researchers tracking toxic contamination, fire plumes, and infrastructure destruction have been left working with fragmentary data as a consequence.
The Climate Mathematics of Two Weeks of War
Research by the Climate and Community Institute found that U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran during just the first 14 days of the war emitted approximately 5 million metric cubic tons of greenhouse gases. To place that figure in context: that volume of carbon emissions is roughly equivalent to what the entire nation of Iceland produces in a full calendar year — generated in a fortnight of airstrikes.
As the conflict extended beyond its initial phase, the range of targeted infrastructure expanded. Missile facilities, weapons depots, oil infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and dual-use civilian infrastructure including power stations and desalination plants were increasingly struck, compounding the cumulative environmental toll with each passing week.
Tehran Under a Cloud of Black Rain
Among the most visible early episodes of environmental harm was a series of Israeli strikes on more than two dozen Iranian oil depots in early March. The attacks engulfed Tehran — a city of 9 million residents — in a dense cloud of toxic smoke. According to CEOBS reporting, the fires rained black carbon and sulfuric acid across the capital in what researchers described as a “black rain” event. The health and environmental consequences for millions of urban residents exposed to those airborne toxins are expected to unfold over years and decades.
Oil fire smoke of this kind carries a complex mixture of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and particulate matter, each associated with elevated cancer risk, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness in exposed populations.
The Cascading Harms of Targeted Infrastructure
The types of facilities being struck carry distinct and overlapping environmental hazard profiles. CEOBS and independent researchers have identified several categories of particular concern:
Desalination Plants
Attacks on water desalination infrastructure carry a dual threat: they jeopardize civilian water supplies in a region where freshwater access is already constrained, and they release harmful chemicals — including sulfuric acid — into surrounding land and marine environments. Coastal and near-coastal ecosystems face contamination risks that can persist long after active hostilities cease.
Urban Infrastructure and Asbestos Contamination
Bombed buildings reduce to rubble laden with legacy construction materials, including asbestos. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health has examined this phenomenon in conflict zones, finding that asbestos-contaminated dust from destroyed infrastructure raises long-term cancer and respiratory disease risks among civilian populations living and working near destruction sites. The same dynamic documented in other conflict zones is now playing out across Iranian cities.
Weapons Facilities and Toxic Propellants
Strikes on weapons depots and missile facilities introduce a distinct category of chemical contamination. CEOBS has documented that such attacks pollute surrounding areas with explosives residues, highly toxic liquid propellants, and heavy metals — compounds that can leach into groundwater and soil for generations, creating contaminated zones that outlast the conflict by decades.
Nuclear Facility Risks
The targeting of nuclear infrastructure represents the most acute potential catastrophe. Attacks on such facilities carry the risk of radiation exposure for civilian populations and, in the most severe scenarios, the possibility of an uncontrolled nuclear incident. The full scope of any radiological releases from strikes on Iranian nuclear sites has not been independently verified, in part because of ongoing restrictions on satellite and independent monitoring access.
Persian Gulf Contamination and the Question of Accountability
The environmental damage extends beyond Iran’s borders into the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei highlighted oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing ashore on Iranian coastlines, describing it as “only one visible example of the extensive pollution — both overt and concealed — that has degraded the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.”
Baqaei raised a set of questions that researchers and international legal scholars are also beginning to ask: who bears responsibility for compensating the environmental damages caused by military operations in shared waterways? The Persian Gulf is not merely a geopolitical theater — it is a marine ecosystem on which millions of people across multiple nations depend for food, livelihoods, and freshwater produced through desalination of its waters.
Future Generations as Inheritors of Toxic Debt
The concept of environmental warfare’s long tail is not abstract. Iraq’s population continues to confront elevated rates of cancers and birth defects linked to depleted uranium and other toxic remnants of the 1991 and 2003 conflicts. Gaza’s landscape, following years of repeated bombardment, faces contamination that public health researchers have called a generational public health emergency. Iran is now entering the same trajectory.
As CEOBS noted in its March assessment, the toxic exposures documented so far threaten not only those living through the current conflict, but the generations who will inherit the land, water, and air left behind. That inheritance — invisible to satellite cameras that have been deliberately switched off, and slow to manifest in bodies that will not show illness for years — is the dimension of this war that receives the least attention and may prove the most enduring.
The Evidentiary Gap
Environmental researchers face a compounding challenge: the deliberate restriction of satellite imagery, the fog of active conflict limiting on-the-ground assessment, and the time lag between toxic exposure and measurable health outcomes. The result is that the full environmental ledger of Operation Epic Fury cannot yet be written. What CEOBS, the Climate and Community Institute, and independent researchers have assembled so far represents a partial accounting — and by their own assessment, the incidents identified are likely an undercount of what has actually occurred.
What is already documented is substantial enough to demand serious scrutiny: greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to a small nation’s annual output generated in two weeks, hundreds of contamination incidents across a dozen countries, a major capital city blanketed in toxic fire smoke, and marine ecosystems absorbing the runoff of industrial conflict — all while the orbital cameras that might illuminate the full scale of the damage have been asked to look away.
This article draws on reporting from The Intercept, research published by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, and reporting by The Associated Press.
