About

Mohammed Usrof is a Palestinian writer and researcher whose work traces how energy infrastructures (grids, pipelines, refineries, ports) organise colonial power and structure everyday life under occupation.

His research follows materials through the systems that govern them: oil from Texas to Ashkelon, cement through Gaza's permit databases, kilowatt-hours through Mandate-era concession ledgers, oranges from a Jaffa orchard to a London supermarket shelf. In each case the question is the same: who controls the flow, who is connected, who is cut off, and what forms of life are made possible or foreclosed.

He works in the traditions of energy humanities, critical logistics, and feminist political ecology, placing Palestine within global debates on fossil capitalism and infrastructure as governance rather than treating it as an exceptional case. His doctoral project at SOAS, University of London, develops the concept of refinery sovereignty: how fossil-fuel chokepoints translate circulation into colonial governance, through archival and infrastructural histories of the Haifa oil corridor and its afterlives.

He is a co-founder of the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy (PICS), a cross-border institute uniting more than forty researchers, campaigners, and youth leaders. His investigations include Fueling Apartheid, tracing the oil supply chains sustaining military operations in Gaza, and he was lead research consultant for Oxfam International's COP30 flagship report on energy inequality. His writing has appeared in The New Arab, Project Syndicate, Jacobin, and Guernica, and his work has been covered, cited, or interviewed in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Jewish Currents, among others.

He has spoken at UNGA78 and at COP28 through COP30, including delivering the YOUNGO opening plenary statement in Dubai, and has led more than thirty-five political-education workshops across universities and climate-justice camps in Europe, Mexico, and the UK. He is a 2026 to 2028 Red Natural History Fellow at The Natural History Museum, the movement museum for climate and environmental justice. He speaks Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. He is from Khan Yunis in Gaza.