The claim that Israel’s military actions in Gaza are motivated by a desire to seize Palestinian oil and gas resources has gained traction since October 2023. Reports and op-eds have been published by Al Jazeera,  TRT World, and the Middle East Eye, with headlines such as “Israel’s Genocidal War on Gaza Is Also About Oil and Gas.” Various environmental NGOs have followed their lead, claiming that “this genocide is about oil.” These claims were further echoed by prominent anti-Israeli social media influencers such as Richard Medhurst and Jake Shields, who claimed that “massive amounts of oil have been discovered off of Gaza. After the genocide is completed, it will be rightfully Israel’s oil.” Even the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine claimed that Israel’s war in Gaza was about “the deadly profit of oil interests” in her November 2023 resignation letter from the paper.

None of these claims has any basis in fact. Gaza does not have any known oil reserves. There are also no known assessments regarding potential oil in Gaza that is waiting to be explored. What Gaza does have is a small, undeveloped offshore natural gas field named “Gaza Marine.” The field was discovered in 2000, but was deemed too small to be commercially viable at the time. The field is estimated to contain only 30 BCM of natural gas, which is a small fraction of the more than 1,000 BCM of natural gas contained in Israel’s own territorial waters (in the Tamar, Leviathan, and Karish/Tanin fields). The idea that Israel would go to war over such a marginal gas field is absurd.

The primary source behind this disinformation campaign about Gaza’s alleged oil reserves is a UN body. Specifically, most of the accusations against Israel can be traced to a 2019 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) entitled “The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential.” The report, written by Atif Kubursi, Professor Emeritus of Economics at McMaster University in Canada, states that “the Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth,” to the tune of “tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars.” It also claims that there are $524 billion worth of energy reserves in the Levant Basin, a bounty that could be shared among the different parties in the region if not for Israel’s “occupation of the Palestinian people.”

Critics of Israel have latched onto the $524 billion figure from the UNCTAD report to argue that Israel’s war in Gaza is driven by a desire to seize its energy assets. However, the report did not attribute these resources to Gaza or the West Bank but to the entire Levant Basin, which includes Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus. The report estimates that Palestinians have lost approximately $2.57 billion in potential revenue from Gaza Marine due to their inability to develop the field. This revenue could, however, be recouped once the field is developed. Egypt was poised to develop the field and share the revenue with the Palestinian Authority, with the approval of the Israeli government, if not for the current war.

In addition, the report points to the Meged oil field – located primarily within Area C of the West Bank – as another possible source of revenue for Palestinians. However, the report deliberately inflates the significance of the field by relying on outdated figures. The report estimates that the field might contain 1.5 billion barrels of oil and have a potential market value of $71 billion, but these figures are based on unsourced PR claims (rather than available geological evidence) that were released prior to commercial production. These assessments have been proven incorrect following repeated attempts to develop the field. Between 2011 and 2016, the field produced only 1 million barrels and shut down due to technical difficulties and dwindling output. The fact that the field has already been proven economically nonviable was ignored in the report, which continued to cite the debunked assessments.

Even under optimal conditions, the Meged field would not produce enough oil to be a central motivator for Israeli military action in the West Bank. This becomes especially clear when considering that a large part of the field is in Israeli territory, so Israel would not have to occupy Area C to access it and produce from it.

The misleading interpretation of the 2019 UNCTAD report could have been dismissed as an innocent mistake, had UNCTAD itself not deliberately presented the findings in such a way. On its website and subsequent press releases, UNCTAD advertised its report with the headline “The unrealized potential of Palestinian oil and gas reserves.” It continued this misrepresentation with the subhead, “Oil and natural gas resources in the occupied Palestinian territory could generate hundreds of billions of dollars for development.” Again, the report does not attribute these numbers to the Palestinian Territories but to the entire Levant Basin, a fact that cannot be inferred from the headline. Moreover, the UNCTAD press release repeats the claim that “Geologists and resource economists have confirmed that the occupied Palestinian territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas,” a bald assertion that is not substantiated in the report.

The UNCTAD report has also been criticized for inflating additional figures and relying on dubious conspiracy blogs as its sources of data, raising serious doubts about the credibility and intentions of its author. The political newsletter “Twilight of Greed” took a deep dive into the report and discovered false and deliberately misleading arguments. For example, the report frequently cites the works of Michel Chossudovsky, who is known for spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about how the Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks and who was accused by the US State Department in 2020 of being a proxy for a Russian disinformation campaign. Despite this, the report cites Chossudovsky 11 times, making him the single most-cited author in the entire report. It even prints his false assertion that the Gaza Marine field is secretly connected to Israeli underwater infrastructure and is slowly being depleted.

It is appalling that an official UN body would approve of such a report and then continue to publicize it with false claims about its content. One of the most troublesome aspects of the narrative is how quickly it has spread on social media, bolstered by a broader anti-Israeli and anti-imperialist sentiment. Despite efforts by experts to debunk these myths, they have become entrenched in the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These claims have been difficult to counter due to the viral nature of social media misinformation. By the time experts began addressing the flaws in the narrative, the theory had gained millions of adherents online.

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza is driven by far more complex political, historical, and security concerns than the control of natural gas or oil. Israel’s current and previous wars in Gaza have focused primarily on security threats posed by Hamas and other militant groups, as well as broader territorial and political disputes. The Gaza Marine and Meged fields, while valuable in an economic sense, are not significant enough to drive military action. The spread of the Gaza oil myth reflects the dangers of relying on dubious sources and conspiracy theories to explain complex geopolitical conflicts. These dangers are only worsened when an official UN body knowingly pushes these theories to center stage, permitting reckless ideologues to launder their viewpoints and providing them with unwarranted credibility.

Dr. Elai Rettig is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies and a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He specializes in energy geopolitics and national security. 

Lee Wilcox is a California-based writer and editor for the American political and historical newsletter “Twilight of Greed.” He currently studies US History at the University of California, Davis.

A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.

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