Israel's Skunk Water: A Weapon of Repression That Doubles as a Global Export

Israel has spent nearly two decades developing and deploying a foul-smelling chemical agent against Palestinians, and the practice shows no signs of slowing. Skunk water, a scent-based non-lethal weapon designed for crowd control, has become a familiar tool of Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and more recently Gaza. But its significance extends far beyond the immediate dispersal of protests. The weapon serves a dual purpose: making Palestinian spaces unliveable while simultaneously marketing Israeli policing expertise to governments around the world.

The most recent reported use of the substance came in late September, when a foul odour spread across Gaza City overnight. Residents initially searched their homes for the source, checking toilets and even their sleeping children before realising the stench was coming from outside. Reports indicated that Israeli aircraft had dropped hundreds of packets containing a foul-smelling substance over populated areas. One witness described waking to a rotten smell that drones had sprayed to pollute the air, expressing disbelief that even the air was being weaponised.

This incident is far from isolated. Skunk water was first developed in 2004 by the Israeli company Odortec, working in partnership with Israel Police's Technological Development Department. It was initially deployed against Palestinian protesters in the West Bank village of Nilin in 2008. The liquid, classified as a scent-based non-lethal weapon, can be fired from water cannons or dropped from drones, making it a versatile tool for military and police operations.

The use of skunk water soon expanded beyond those early West Bank villages. 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 neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, spraying homes, streets, and schools. In the at-Tur neighbourhood, four schools were hit, forcing approximately 4,500 pupils to stay home because of the lingering smell.

By 2018, Israel had begun deploying skunk water from the air. During the Great March of Return protests in Gaza, the Israeli military used a drone called Shoko to douse Palestinian demonstrators with the foul-smelling liquid, dropping it from a payload of plastic bags. This aerial capability represented a significant escalation in the weapon's deployment, allowing Israeli forces to target larger areas and more dispersed crowds.

For Israeli authorities, the utility of skunk water goes well beyond simple crowd control. While spraying it on a protest certainly causes people to scatter, spraying it over streets, homes, and entire neighbourhoods transforms it into a tool for making Palestinian space itself unliveable. The persistent stench contaminates living areas, disrupts daily life, and forces residents to abandon their homes temporarily. It is, in effect, a form of environmental warfare that targets the civilian population's ability to reside, congregate, and function normally.

There is another dimension to Israel's enthusiasm for skunk water: the country sells the methods it has developed to control Palestinians. When the weapon was first deployed in 2008, reports indicated that Israeli police 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 litre bottle of the dirty, green liquid, claiming it was totally harmless and that one could even drink it.

The use of skunk water against Palestinians feeds Israel's global reputation as a pioneer of counterinsurgency and policing technologies. Every deployment offers another demonstration of Israeli expertise in controlling a population that the state presents as uniquely dangerous. This reputation has real commercial value. By 2007, Beit Alfa Technologies had already supplied skunk water to the South African Police Service, along with water cannons and riot-control gear. These supplies were later used against demonstrators during the Fees Must Fall protests in 2015.

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. In the United States, Mistral Security supplies skunk water, claiming that the stench 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 materials make the connection to Palestine unusually explicit. Its website uses a photograph of Israeli forces deploying skunk water against Palestinians in the West Bank. The Palestinians subjected to the weapon become part of the proof that it works, their suffering repurposed as a testimonial for the product's effectiveness.

Following the 2014 Ferguson protests, Mistral supplied skunk water to several US police departments. This included the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department in Missouri, which acquired the liquid in 2015 after the unrest in Ferguson. A report on the shipment to Missouri captured what makes the weapon attractive to police forces. The poisoning of a place, it observed, can destroy people's willingness to reside, congregate, protest, or even document a location until it is cleaned away. The report described skunk water as potentially a system for maintaining new apartheids.

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. It is a state presented as uniquely experienced in managing populations that it characterises as threatening. Every export of the substance carries with it the implicit endorsement of Israeli methods, methods that have been developed and refined through the systematic repression of Palestinian life.

The implications of this trade are significant. As governments around the world seek tools for managing dissent and controlling crowds, Israel offers a ready-made solution backed by what it presents as decades of operational experience. The fact that this experience has been gained through the occupation and subjugation of Palestinians is not hidden but rather marketed as a selling point. The weapon itself is relatively simple, but the knowledge and legitimacy that accompany it are far more valuable. In this sense, skunk water represents a broader phenomenon: the commodification of repression, where methods developed to control one population are packaged and sold to control others, with the original victims serving as proof of concept.