Israel clears sea munitions to protect coastal waters and shipping
The team’s fifth diving mission aimed to help Israel prepare for clearing unexploded grenades from parts of the sea safely.
- Project goal: Clear about 2 km of Rishon LeZion coastline used historically as a firing range.
- Field challenge: Currents, sediment shift and marine growth make buried munitions hard to locate.
- Methods used: Sonar mapping, magnetometers, remotely operated vehicles, and diver search patterns.
- Environmental risk: Corrosion can release toxic chemicals and heavy metals into marine life.
- Safety risk: Unexploded ordnance can detonate if disturbed, endangering beach users.
- Global context: Europe and Germany have run similar clearance initiatives for wartime and industrial munitions.
- Strategic link: Clean seabeds matter for shipping, energy projects, and undersea communications infrastructure.
- Operational lesson: Failed dives inform better search patterns and equipment calibration for future attempts.
They trained like salvage divers and searched like treasure hunters, but on that June morning off Rishon LeZion, the sea kept its secrets. Marking coordinates on a handheld GPS, an Israeli diver tossed an anchor while another dropped an orange buoy; on the cramped bow the team checked wetsuits, strapped on tanks and rehearsed signals. Hours later, after combing the seabed for yellow-painted mock mortar shells they had planted months before, the divers surfaced empty-handed — a small but telling glimpse of the difficulty ahead.
“This isn’t like finding something on land,” said Roy Jaijel, a researcher in marine geology and geophysics at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography, as he climbed back aboard. Jaijel co-leads a first-of-its-kind Israeli project to clear roughly two kilometres of coastline in Rishon LeZion that was long used as a firing range. The aim is simple and human: make the beaches safe again so families can reclaim sand and sea. But the sea is a messy archive; currents, shifting sand and biological growth hide, move or even bury objects, turning straightforward clearance into a complex, patient craft.
Underwater munitions are a global problem with local consequences. Some explosives were dumped after conflicts, others fell during wartime or accumulated through decades of live firing at coastal ranges. Over time seawater corrodes casings, and toxic components and heavy metals can leach into the marine environment, threatening fish, shellfish and the people who eat them. There’s also a blunt public-safety risk: objects that look like debris or toys can detonate if disturbed, putting beachgoers and children in danger.
The Rishon LeZion effort sits at the intersection of environmental stewardship, public safety and growing demand for the ocean’s resources. As seas are pressed into service for shipping lanes, energy projects and fiber-optic communications, the incentive to map and clear seabeds has only increased. Experts note that the global push for connectivity — including the undersea cables that stitch continents together for digital services and AI applications — makes clean seabeds more than a local concern; they are critical infrastructure backdrops whose integrity matters to trade, communications and security.
Finding and neutralizing underwater munitions requires more than divers and good will. The project blends sonar mapping, magnetometer sweeps, remotely operated vehicles and targeted diver interventions. Even so, tests like the one off Rishon LeZion expose the limits of tech and human coordination: markers shift, sonar returns can be ambiguous, and what was planted as a clear target can be buried under months of sediment or obscured by marine growth. Every failed dive is also a lesson — refining search patterns, changing sampling intervals, and recalibrating equipment to the local seabed’s temperament.
Europe and other regions have lately stepped up similar efforts. where millions of tonnes of ordnance remain. Those initiatives combine environmental concerns with the practicalities of maritime safety, disposal logistics and legal responsibility — a reminder that cleaning the sea is as much policy work as it is engineering.
For the team in Israel, the work is quietly urgent and deeply human. It’s about restoring a stretch of sand to children who want to play without fear, about protecting fishermen and the wider marine ecosystem, and about proving that societies can repair the overlooked wreckage of old conflicts. Each dive, even the unsuccessful ones, builds expertise; each adjustment in method increases the chances that one day soon the people of Rishon LeZion will walk a shoreline truly cleared and safe.