Nile crocodiles once patrolled the rivers from South Africa to Syria. But the apex predators have since disappeared from much of their native range, driven away by hunting, habitat loss and dam building.
Within the borders of modern-day Israel, the last confirmed sighting of a wild Nile crocodile was in 1905. Since then, the species has survived locally only in captivity, in conservation centres and crocodile farms. In 2012, Israel subsequently banned their commercial use – until now.
On 15 July this year, Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman removed their protected status, placing the animals in an unexpected category: “cultivated wild animal”. The shift allows the crocodiles to be managed by multiple government bodies rather than remaining under the sole authority of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA), the agency responsible for protected species.
Control of some captive crocodiles could now be transferred from the INPA to the Israel Prison Service (IPS), streamlining a proposal for crocodile-filled moats to encircle maximum-security wings in Israeli prisons. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir first proposed the idea in December 2025, reportedly inspired by President Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention centre in Florida.
“The Israel Prison Service welcomes the move, which will ease the burden on prison officers guarding Nukhba (Hamas) terrorists,” said Ben-Gvir’s office, which oversees the IPS, in a statement.
After Silman’s announcement, Ben-Gvir posted an AI-generated image of him kneeling beside a crocodile with the caption: “Are you thinking of attempting to escape? Think again.”
Trenches are reportedly already being dug at Ketziot Prison in the Negev desert, which primarily houses Palestinian prisoners. The National Security Ministry has reportedly allocated NIS 21 million ($7 million) for the trenches, yet the Jerusalem District Court issued a temporary injunction against the plan on 2 August citing animal welfare concerns, in response to a petition by the Israeli Let the Animals Live advocacy group. The court is now reviewing the case.
Three days after the court order, Ben-Gvir and Silman visited the trenches around Ketziot Prison to inspect construction progress.
“Anyone who attacks our people should know that they will end up spending the night in a place surrounded by crocodiles,” Silman told reporters after visiting the site.
WIRED Middle East reached out to INPA for comment on the potential use of crocodiles in Israeli prisons, but did not receive a response. In a statement to The Times of Israel, INPA said it had found “no professional or scientific basis anywhere in the world for bringing crocodiles into a detention facility for use as a security measure.”
Yet Palestinian researchers see the shifting protections of an endangered species as part of a wider system in which environmental policies serve what they identify as a political agenda.
Making the Desert Bloom
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has promoted itself as an environmental success story: transforming harsh arid landscapes into forests, fertile farmland and protected wilderness.
The nonprofit Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), referred to here as the JNF, played a central role in this transformation, overseeing mass afforestation initiatives across desert and grassland ecosystems.
In its own historical account, focusing on the 1941-1950 decade, the JNF wrote that: “Afforestation activities are firmly grounded in land reclamation and settlement.”
After the 1948 displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians, over 1 million dunams of land were transferred to the control of the JNF under the Absentees’ Property Law (1950) and Transfer of Property Law (1950), which enabled the newly formed Israeli state to seize and redistribute property abandoned that year. The JNF subsequently launched global fundraising initiatives for tree-planting schemes, turning displaced Palestinian villages into forested parks and recreation areas.
Today, the JNF owns approximately 13% of the land in Israel and says it has planted more than 250 million trees, including large numbers of fast-growing conifers and eucalyptus.
These trees often conceal the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages. Lubya, the subject of the documentary The Village Under the Forest, was forcibly emptied in July 1948. Its deserted ruins now lie beneath the South Africa Forest.
“It is not about the usage of the land to protect nature,” says Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability. “It’s the usage of the land to exclude the indigenous people.”
According to research by Noga Kadman, the author of Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948, over 180 depopulated Palestinian villages are now within the boundaries of Israeli parks, forests or nature reserves.
“During the foundation of the state of Israel, millions of trees were uprooted, and in place of those uprooted trees, the colonial settlers planted pine trees. Monoculture replaced the local biodiversity,” says Qumsiyeh. He points to the local extinction of species, including the Syrian bear, fishing owl and Asiatic leopard, alongside large-scale transformation of the landscape.
“There was diversion of waters, drainage of wetlands, and destruction of forests and even mountains to produce a landscape that’s very, very different from what existed here for the past tens of thousands of years,” he adds. “This landscape is devastated.”
In its response to a 2004 Supreme Court petition filed by Adalah, a Palestinian Arab-run legal centre in Israel, challenging the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from bidding for JNF-controlled land, the JNF said: “The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.”
The court did not rule on the discrimination claim. In January 2016, it closed the petition and two related cases by consent following an agreement between the state and the JNF.
In response to questions about its tree-planting schemes, the KKL-JNF told WIRED Middle East that its activities comply with Israeli law, take place on state-owned land and are coordinated with the Israel Land Authority. The statement did not directly address allegations about historical land reclamation.
Instead, KKL-JNF described its tree planting as an environmental project intended to prevent soil erosion, promote biodiversity and rehabilitate open spaces. It said its broader activities include “land reclamation, environmental conservation and sustainable development.”
That description nevertheless explicitly reflects the organisation’s mandate. “As a Zionist organization established more than 120 years ago to acquire and develop land for the future of the State of Israel, KKL-JNF continues to carry out its activities in accordance with the law and with the relevant planning and land-management authorities,” the statement said.
Exclusion Through Nature
Today the Jewish National Fund manages forested areas, and the INPA administers national parks and nature reserves – including those within East Jerusalem and the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.
“National parks are part of this whole philosophy to maximise the area of land to be confiscated from the Palestinians and prevent them from using it,” says Dr Rami Nasrallah, an honorary associate professor at the University College London’s Bartlett Development Planning Unit.
Once land is categorised as a protected reserve, local Palestinian communities are prohibited from building, grazing their sheep and any form of farming without special permissions.
“There is no relation between environmental value and declaring an area a nature reserve,” adds Nasrallah. “It’s a tool for annexation.”
The INPA classifies a nature reserve as “an area in which animals, vegetation, abiotic objects, soil, caves, water or landscape, which are of scientific or educational interest, are preserved without undesirable changes,” and a national park as “an area serving or designated to serve for the countryside recreation of the public or for the preservation of values that are of historical, archeological, architectural, natural or landscape importance and the like.”
A paper coauthored by Qumsiyeh found that over 22 nature reserves in the West Bank do not meet ecological criteria for protection, concluding their designation was due to political and ideological reasons. In other examples, areas are considered ecologically important by scientists, but restrictions are enforced unequally.
Qumsiyeh points to the example of Wadi Qana in the northern West Bank. The area was designated a nature reserve in 1983, preventing Palestinians in neighbouring villages from farming or planting citrus trees. An unauthorised Israeli settler outpost was later constructed within the national park – illegal under Israeli law – before the park’s boundaries were redrawn in 2014 to exclude the settlement’s lands, while its untreated sewage was dumped in Wadi Qana.
In 2022, INPA publicly stated, “According to Israeli law, declaration of any land as a National Park does not change its ownership status, as all private lands within a National Park remain in their owner’s possession.”
WIRED Middle East contacted INPA for comment on its criteria for declaring a national park or nature reserve, including the redrawing of the Wadi Qana boundaries, but did not receive a response.
Unequal Protection
Environmental policies and wildlife protections have long intersected with fights over territorial control in the occupied West Bank.
Despite ecological evidence that wild boars are overpopulated, the INPA classifies them as a protected, specially managed species. Hunting requires permits and access to firearms, which Palestinians in the occupied West Bank generally cannot obtain. Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has expanded eligibility for Israeli settlers to receive gun licences.
Wild boars destroy farmland, driving large-scale crop losses, and attack and maim people in the fields. Reports allege the Israeli army has released boars into Palestinian villages during military offensives, while Israeli settlers have also reportedly introduced boar onto Palestinian land.
“All this disruption of our environment resulted in an increase in the wild boar population because the animals that used to hunt them have declined,” Qumsiyeh says. “The wolves and the leopards are gone.”
In this system of ecological imbalance, striped hyenas deliver another source of conflict. Protected under Israeli wildlife regulations, the animals enter Palestinian communities in search of food. Yet Palestinians have limited access to the wildlife management programmes, compensation schemes and human-wildlife conflict mitigation measures commonly available in other nations, leaving communities to navigate encounters with potentially dangerous protected species largely on their own.
The fight even extends to local flora. Since 1977, Israel has prohibited the harvesting of wild za’atar – a herb with deep roots in Palestinian history and cuisine – by giving it protected status. Palestinians caught foraging the plant face jail time.
For Palestinian researchers, these cases are not isolated conservation decisions but different expressions of the same system.
“These are Palestinian landscapes that need to be protected. But Palestinians are not allowed to preserve their own heritage,” says Nasrallah. “It’s all part of the land domination."
