In Gaza City, residents reported a powerful rotten smell after aircraft dropped packets of foul-smelling liquid over populated areas in late September, according to an opinion analysis by Somdeep Sen. The episode has renewed attention to “skunk water”, a crowd-control product used by Israeli forces and police in several settings.
A tool designed to disperse crowds
The product was developed in 2004 by Odortec with the Israel Police technology department. It can be sprayed from water cannons or released from drones. Its odour is intended to linger, making it difficult for people to remain in the affected area. Sen argues that this turns a crowd-control device into a means of making public spaces unpleasant or unusable.
The author traces its use to demonstrations in the West Bank, including protests in Ni’lin and villages such as Bil’in, Kafr Qaddum and Nabi Saleh. Sen describes incidents in which demonstrators, residents and journalists were sprayed. During the 2014 period in East Jerusalem, the essay says, the smell affected schools in the neighbourhood of at-Tur and disrupted attendance.
From protest sites to homes
Sen also recalls the 2018 Great March of Return protests in Gaza, where the author says drones dropped packets of the liquid over demonstrators. The recent reports from Gaza City raise a different concern: when the substance is used over residential areas, people who are not taking part in a protest may also be exposed.
Sen’s central argument is that repeated use can extend the impact beyond a momentary dispersal. If the smell settles on homes, streets or community facilities, residents may be deterred from using ordinary public spaces. That claim is the author’s interpretation of the product’s effects and the way it has been deployed.
Questions about its wider use
The opinion piece also follows the product’s international sales, citing deployments or trials in South Africa, India and the United States. Those examples do not by themselves establish how every police force used the product, but they point to the broader debate over the export of crowd-control technologies and the oversight applied to them.
Sen argues that authorities and manufacturers should be judged not only by claims that a product is safe or effective, but by where and against whom it is used. The essay is commentary, not an independent technical assessment of the liquid’s health effects. Its wider question is whether a device promoted for crowd management can also serve as a lasting form of pressure on communities.
