Israel's Skunk Water: From West Bank Crowd Control to a Global Export

Israel has spent nearly two decades turning foul odors into a weapon against Palestinians, and the practice is now drawing fresh attention after reports that Israeli aircraft dropped hundreds of packets of a malodorous substance over populated areas of Gaza City in late September. Residents across the city reported waking to a stench so powerful that many initially searched their own homes for the source, suspecting a toilet or even a child before realizing the smell was coming from the air itself. One witness described Israeli drones spraying the foul odor to pollute the atmosphere, asking in disbelief, "Even the air?"

The substance at the center of these reports is widely believed to be skunk water, an olfactory weapon developed in 2004 by the Israeli company Odortec in partnership with the Israel Police's Technological Development Department. It was first deployed against Palestinian protesters in the West Bank village of Nilin in 2008. Classified as a "scent-based non-lethal weapon" intended for crowd control, it can be fired from water cannons or dropped from drones, and its use has expanded dramatically over the years.

The trajectory of skunk water's deployment tells a story of escalation. In 2013, activists demonstrating against the closure of Shuhada Street in Hebron, along with journalists covering the protest, were sprayed with the putrid liquid. The following year, Israeli police drove skunk trucks through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, spraying homes, streets, and schools. In the at-Tur area, four schools were hit, forcing approximately 4,500 pupils to stay home because of the lingering smell.

By 2018, Israel had taken the weapon to the skies. During the Great March of Return, the Israeli military used a drone known as Shoko to douse Palestinian protesters in Gaza with the foul-smelling liquid, deploying it from a payload of plastic bags. The evolution from ground-based water cannons to airborne dispersal marked a significant expansion in the weapon's reach and application.

For Israeli authorities, the utility of skunk water extends far beyond dispersing crowds at protests. When sprayed over streets, homes, and entire neighborhoods, it becomes a tool for making Palestinian space itself unlivable. The poisoning of a place, as one analysis observed, can destroy people's willingness to reside, congregate, protest, or even document a location until the smell is cleaned away. This characteristic has led some observers to describe skunk water as potentially constituting "a system for maintaining new apartheids."

There is another dimension to Israel's enthusiasm for the weapon: it serves as a demonstration of methods developed to control Palestinians, which Israel then sells to the world. When skunk water was first deployed in 2008, Israeli police reportedly had high hopes of turning it into a commercial venture and selling it to law-enforcement agencies overseas. Superintendent David Ben Harosh even appeared on air hugging a liter bottle of the dirty, green liquid, boasting that it was "totally harmless" and that one could "even drink it."

The use of skunk water against Palestinians—whom Israel has long characterized as a symbol of pathological evil—also feeds the country's global reputation as a pioneer of counterinsurgency and policing technologies. Each deployment offers another demonstration of Israeli expertise in controlling a population it presents as uniquely dangerous, creating a feedback loop in which repression of Palestinians becomes a marketing tool for the weapons used against them.

By the time skunk water was being deployed in the West Bank, Israel had already begun exporting it. In 2007, Beit Alfa Technologies supplied skunk water to the South African Police Service along with water cannons and riot-control gear. These weapons were later used against demonstrators during the Fees Must Fall protests in 2015, illustrating how technologies developed in one context can travel to suppress dissent in entirely different settings.

In 2017, India's Central Reserve Police Force tested skunk water for crowd control in places including Jammu and Kashmir. The Who Profits Research Center has also reported being approached by a company seeking help contacting Odortec to purchase the liquid for sale to Colombian police. These examples demonstrate the global reach of a weapon first developed for use against Palestinians.

In the United States, Mistral Security supplies skunk water, claiming that "the stench of Skunk immediately causes individuals and crowds to cease their activities while allowing Law Enforcement to gain control with minimum injuries and casualties." The company's marketing makes the connection to Palestine unusually explicit: its website uses a photograph of Israeli forces deploying skunk water against Palestinians in the West Bank, turning the subjects of the weapon into part of the proof that it works.

Following the 2014 Ferguson protests, Mistral supplied skunk water to several US police departments, including the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department in Missouri, which acquired the liquid in 2015 in the wake of the unrest. The shipment to Missouri highlighted what makes the weapon attractive to law enforcement agencies: its ability to render a location unusable for assembly or protest without causing physical injuries that might generate political backlash.

What Israel sells, then, is more than a foul-smelling liquid. Skunk water comes wrapped in the reputation Israel has built through decades of controlling Palestinians—a state presented as uniquely experienced in managing populations it deems threatening. The weapon's appeal lies not only in its immediate effects but in the entire apparatus of knowledge and experience that accompanies it, making every deployment against Palestinians a form of advertisement for the methods and technologies Israel has developed.