The hook
In October 2025, the city of Gabès stopped. On the eleventh, protesters stormed the gates of the — the state-owned chemical group that has run this complex since 1992. On the twenty-first, the called a general strike , and the governorate stood still. On the twenty-second, more than twenty schoolchildren were hospitalised at the Collège Chatt Essalem after a gas leak from a GCT unit — the school named for the beach the factory faces. The gas itself: the record does not say .
And the measurements that had been true for decades finally became public documents. Into the sea: every day, fourteen to fifteen thousand tonnes of gypsum . Into the air: sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fluorides, ammonia, dust — measured once, in March 2010, at up to twenty-six times the legal limit for sulphur, seventy times for fine particles , and never measured again . From the state's own company, which the state owns at 99.998 percent . But this story does not start in 2025. It starts before the factory. It starts with a rock, a railway, and a Gulf that fed a country.
The discovery and the railway
In April 1885, a French amateur geologist named Philippe Thomas found thick layers of calcium phosphate on the north slope of Jebel Thelja, above the town of Metlaoui. In 1897, a company was created to dig it — the CPGCFG , backed by the Mirabaud and Hottinger banking houses of Paris, granted an exclusive sixty-year concession plus thirty thousand hectares of state land in exchange for building a railway to the coast. The line reached Sfax in 1899: 242 kilometres . In 1916, a branch reached Gabès — 83 kilometres to the town that would one day host the factory .
And the sea that coastline faced? The richest fishing ground in the southern Mediterranean — surveyed from 1925 by Le Danois , mapped by Calypso in 1965, and in 1971 by two Tunisian scientists of the Salammbô institute, Ktari, Chakroun & Azouz , who published the last great survey of the Gulf before the factory. The Gulf was not a waste pipe. It was a nursery — mapped, measured, prized. The timeline records both things, in that order.
The first factory and the state
Meanwhile, Tunisia decided to stop exporting rock and start processing it. In 1947 the state created the SIAPE — SIAPE — at Sfax, with a French industrialist, François Breynert , as its first president. In 1952 its TSP factory started — triple superphosphate, 330,000 tonnes a year .
And after independence, the state took the whole chain, company by company: 1962, the M'dhilla company became fully Tunisian; 1967, the old concession railway was absorbed into the state railway, the ; 1969, the pieces merged; and in January 1976 everything was consolidated under one name — the , the CPG — "an enterprise in which the state holds the majority of the shares", in the group's own history; entirely owned by the Tunisian government, says the NRGI report.
But the biggest single decision was still ahead: where to put the chemical plants. The answer was Gabès — a town on the Gulf, at the end of a railway branch that had been waiting fifty-six years for its cargo.
The complexes go in — two streams from day one
Then the factories went in, one after another — each with its own company, each with its own president, and each with the same two disposal habits.
In 1972, the phosphoric acid plant opened at Gabès, in the Ghannouch industrial zone, under the name ICM — the ICM — 470,000 tonnes of merchant acid a year. Who built it? The French engineering group SPIE Batignolles — and the company's own environmental director, Noureddine Trabelsi , told investigators in 2015 that SPIE Batignolles "programmed" the sea discharges from the start.
And the air: the same plants that made the acid also made the plume — sulphur dioxide from the sulphuric units, nitrogen oxides from the nitric acid, fluorides from the phosphoric acid, ammonia and dust from the DAP granulators and the ammonium-nitrate prilling towers . Two streams, both from day one: the grey stream into the Gulf, the pale plume over the town.
In 1974, a second acid line. In 1975, a new company, the SAEPA — SAEPA — whose president, Ali Boukhris , was simultaneously president of the ICM, of SIAPE, and of SAEPA through the whole first decade — one manager over the three companies that built both pollutions. In 1979, the DAP plant — 650,000 tonnes a year. In 1983, the ammonium nitrate unit, 330,000 tonnes — a unit whose prilling tower is, even today, the single most expensive air fix in the corrective plan. In 1985, a second DAP line under EG , and a TSP plant at M'dhilla run by the ICG . In 1988, the phosphoric acid plant at Skhira . Four sites by 1989.
And every one of them — every single one — discharged its gypsum into the sea and its gases into the air . Neither stream is a malfunction that arrived later. Both were there from the first day of production.
They knew — the documentation clock
Now the part of the century that changes the meaning of everything before it.
The sea damage was measured early: the state's own institute at Salammbô INSTM began its surveillance in 1976 , four years after the plant opened — Darmoul, Hadj Ali Salem and Vitiello measured lethal concentrations at the outfall by 1978 and 230 hectares of dead seabed by 1980 ; in 1988 Darmoul recommended storing the gypsum on land ; in 1989 the state adopted its own water standard, NT 106.002 , seventeen years after the discharges began.
The sea was measured. Now the air.
In March 2010 — the only time it has ever been done — the company commissioned an engineering consortium, COMETE-SNC-LAVALIN-IHE, to measure what the stacks put out. The results, relayed by the 2025 audit: sulphur dioxide at up to 7,800 milligrams per cubic metre against a limit of 300 — twenty-six times . Fine particles at 352 against a limit of five — seventy times. Fluorides at four times the limit.
The same year, 2010, the state adopted its own source-emission standard, Décret 2010-2519 . And then — nothing. No campaign since March 2010. No continuous monitoring . The audit calls it a major non-conformity: "no measurement campaign more recent than March 2010 was identified." Fifteen years, one measurement.
And the famous number about the air — "ninety-five percent of the region's atmospheric pollution comes from the plants" — is not a measurement at all . It comes from a 2003 expertise commissioned by the court at Gabès, a man named Medhioub , relayed by the 2017 EU study, repeated by the 2025 audit with the hedge "according to a study" — and never re-measured.
The sea was measured, and measured again. The air was measured once. The claim about the air was never measured at all.
The merge and the peak
In 1992, the state finished the foundation it had begun in 1947: SIAPE and SAEPA merged into a single group — the — after the ICM, Engrais de Gabès and the Industries Chimiques de Gafsa had been absorbed into SIAPE. One name. One owner. And in 1994, the state put the mining company and the chemical group under a single chief executive — Rafaâ Dekhil , from 1994 to 2001.
From then on, the top of the chain was concentrated to a degree the numbers make concrete: 99.998 percent of the group in one hand , and from 1994 one chief executive over both the mining company and the chemical group . And what did that concentration do with the machine?
It ran it to its record: the official series shows 7.8 million tonnes in 1998, 8.03 in 1999, and a peak in the year 2000 at 8.3 million tonnes . That is the true record — not the famous 2010 figure, which is 8.131, rounded to "8.2" by everyone who repeated it .
In 2008, output dipped to 7.6 — the year the mining basin of Gafsa revolted over a hiring contest . In 2010, it recovered. And in 2011 — the year of the revolution — it collapsed: 2.28 million tonnes . The machine lost two-thirds of its output in a single year. The waste did not collapse with it.
And by 2014, the seagrass was ninety percent gone — from roughly 1,300 square kilometres in 1970 to less than 150 — the calculation of El Zrelli & Rabaoui . The output curve fell. The waste curve did not. And the plume — the plume had no curve at all: it had one measurement.
The half-broken machine, the pricing, and the air
After the collapse, the machine never recovered. A decade at three and a half million tonnes — half of the old output. The Gabès complex ran at forty percent or less, by its own director-general 's account; some units at twenty, said the engineer Houcine Rhili .
And the air kept doing what the air does.
The hospital data exists — a study by Kwas and colleagues at Gabès University Hospital, a pneumonia cohort from 2022, found that outdoor sulphur dioxide was significantly associated with patients needing non-invasive ventilation and higher severity scores, and fine particles with lung abscess and pleural effusion . The ambient measurements exist — Ahbil, Sellami & Azri measured the suburban air in 2017 to 2019 and found it unhealthy for sensitive groups more than one day in five . And the lived record exists — the 2025 audit's own surveys of residents and workers: unanimous that the situation is "very grave"; the workers naming sulphur oxides and fluorinated gases; asphyxiation, respiratory and eye and skin irritation, a persistent sharp sulphur smell . The audit itself notes these are perceptions, not yet measured — its own recommendation.
And the state's responses to the health question have a pattern: in 2013 and 2014, a project for an offshore cancer hospital at Gabès collapsed in mutual recriminations . In March 2021, a fire at the unit killed five workers, and the president announced a cancer-treatment centre . In October 2025, the health minister announced a specialised cancer-disease pole for Gabès within two years . Three responses in twelve years. And no incidence statistics: the only circulating figure — "ten percent lung cancer" — traces to a single academic article whose own source is unread . The state treats the burden. The burden is not measured.
And in the ledger of the damage: the fisheries at sixty million euros a year , the ecosystem loss a hundred and five million , the machine at forty percent — and the air, measured once, in 2010, never again.
The crisis year
The present, then — and it is a story of its own, in two streams.
On the fifth of March 2025, a restricted cabinet council — chaired by Prime Minister Kamel Maddouri, presented by the Minister of Industry Fatma Thabet Chiboub — multiplied the production target by five, to fourteen million tonnes, and in the same meeting reclassified phosphogypsum as a "value-added product" . Same factory, same squares, new word.
In July, the environmental audit — commissioned by the company because the African Development Bank required it — published the daily numbers: fourteen to fifteen thousand tonnes of gypsum into the Gulf , and the record of the air: the 2010 campaign's exceedances , the absence of any campaign since, the absence of continuous monitoring .
In October, the city erupted — and the air was the trigger. On the fourteenth, children at the Collège Chatt Essalem were asphyxiated after inhaling toxic gases from a GCT unit; some lost consciousness . On the twenty-second, more than twenty were hospitalised after a gas leak . The gas is never named in any report — the record ends at "a unit of the GCT" .
On the twentieth, the minister Slah Zouari told parliament that six unfinished environmental projects, about two hundred million dinars, were "directly linked to toxic gas emissions" — and gave the progress: nitrogen oxides, ninety-eight percent; sulphur dioxide, seventy-five; ammonia, eighty-four . The same projects the company's own 2009–2020 environmental plan promised, still unfinished in 2025 . Unfinished through three governments since 2009 , they support two readings at once: deprioritised by choice, or stuck in the machinery of the state itself. The record does not separate them. Of the two, incapacity is not the milder finding.
On the twenty-sixth of February 2026, the tribunal rejected the motion to halt the units: the harm, it said, was not established . The target was walked back three times . The minister was dismissed . took both groups . The guarantees grew by three hundred million dollars and euros . The word changed. The target shrank. The money grew. The discharge continued — into the sea, and into the air.
The wall
And the rules that are not written — now in both layers.
The company's own annual reports stop at 2014 . The ministry's 2023 row is blank . The task force's plan — Ali Ben Hammoud's team — never published . The transfer price, never published .
And the air: the emissions were measured once, in 2010 — and the audit's own finding is that there has been no campaign since and no continuous monitoring : the air is the least-measured thing in this whole story. No air-quality series for Gabès turned up in the search . No cancer-incidence statistics either . The gas that hospitalised twenty children on the twenty-second of October: unnamed .
One document exists, and it exists because the bank required it .
And the editor of the magazine that publishes the company rankings — Hédi Mechri — wrote, in his editorial for the 2026 edition: "The black-out resurfaces. Move along — there is nothing to see" .
Across a century, that concentration produced factories, output, waste, standards, documents, a task force. Into the air it produced a plume, measured once. What it failed to produce was the record. The timeline keeps walking. The wall stays up.
The answer
Can the moral question be answered? Three times yes.
Legally: the state's own audit says the discharges violate the state's own standards — the water standard of 1989 , the air standard of 2010 .
Economically: El Zrelli and colleagues put the 2014 damage at one hundred fifteen percent of what the factories add . One team's estimate; its components and method are noted in the ledger.
Definitionally: the state reclassified the waste instead of treating it .
How much does it make? Two to three billion dinars a year, on the record that exists — and the most famous figure is the least reliable. How much does the state make? Less than it spends, on the record. How much do the people pay? More than the factories add. Is it okay? By its own documents, no.
And the air: the state's company measured its own stacks once, in 2010 — sulphur at twenty-six times the limit, particles at seventy — and never measured again . The "95%" the whole country repeats was never measured at all . The gas that hospitalised twenty children was never named . The cancer the state keeps promising to treat has no count in the searched record .
The sea is measured. The air is named. The distance between those two facts is the finding this whole ledger has been building toward.
The timeline reaches 2026, and it does not stop. The next point on it is being decided now.