We were on the scent of pirate trash burners. In seven minutes, an adrenaline-fueled, foot-on-the-gas dash took us along dusty back roads to catch Palestinians in the act of illegally incinerating waste.

This reporter and a team from the Ecopeace Middle East organization drove behind the truck of a senior official from the Palestinian town of Azzoun, east of Qalqilya in the West Bank, when black smoke began to billow over a group of trees.

We followed the black clouds to a field backed by residential housing, where two men were burning cables to extract the metals inside for sale.

The flames were so powerful that a hose was no match as the men spotted us and tried haplessly to extinguish the fire.

The Palestinian official who had agreed to take us on a tour of waste fire sites spoke with the men and took photos. But he was powerless to punish them, because in Area C of the West Bank (as established by the 1993 Oslo Accords), Israel’s Civil Administration and police are tasked with maintaining order.

He said he would file a report to the governor of the Qalqilya District, in the hope that the two men would be summoned to a Palestinian court. But he said he doubted the offenders would be deterred, given that Palestinian environmental law and the fines contained within had not been updated since the end of Jordanian control of the West Bank in 1967.

He noted that the Azzoun council had received many complaints about waste fires from residents in the area.

The official’s inability to act is just one aspect of a long-running problem of illegal waste burning on both sides of the Green Line that separates the West Bank from Israel.

As official reports published in 2017, 2019, and 2024 have shown, it would take multiple players to halt the waste burning, but coordination between them is poor, and successive Israeli governments have remained indifferent.

Now, less than a year away from elections, the political leadership has woken up.

This month, in a rearguard action, the Civil Administration has been sending heavy vehicles to block access roads to pirate waste sites, while its Environmental Quality Unit is busy covering fires with earth around Palestinian Na’alin, a waste fire hotspot, to provide temporary relief to Shoham and nearby Modiin, in central Israel.

The West Bank is home to some 3.4 million Palestinians, according to mid-2025 figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. It stretches almost 130 kilometers (80 miles) from north to south, but is served by just two landfill facilities.

A third landfill site at Ramun, near Ramallah, has been under discussion since 2003, but has been mired in controversy.

In the West Bank, mixed municipal waste is burned on the outskirts of towns and villages that lack the funds to transport trash over long distances to the landfill sites.

Additionally, electronic waste, driven into the West Bank from Israel, is burned to extract saleable metals. The practice is believed to involve criminals on both sides, including Israelis who want to avoid Israeli landfill fees and long journeys to landfill sites in southern Israel. Also illegally ferried into the West Bank is building waste and excess earth from Israeli construction sites.

During just 15 minutes, this........

© The Times of Israel