And now the poison and pestilence

Articles from Al Akhbar and The Independent

Municipal workers in Gaza city dump garbage on a temporary site as they can no longer reach the usual facilities Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

Gaza residents now face battle against infectious diseases

A Palestinian boy, wounded following an Israeli military strike, is treated upon his arrival at the hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on August 3, 2014. (Photo: AFP-Mohammed Hams)

By Sanaa Kamal, Al Akhbar
August 07, 2014

The repercussions of the war are beginning to gradually unfold. From bombing wells used for drinking water, sewage and power plants, to launching gas bombs suspected of being toxic, to targeting medical workers and even preventing municipalities from disposing of garbage away from residential areas, Israel has condemned Gaza to an environmental and health disaster.

Gaza – The war has been suspended for now, but its devastating effects continue to burden Palestinians in Gaza who have been exhausted by displacement and destitution after 30 days of constant bombardment that not only created an economic crisis, but destroyed all hope of an economic recovery for at least ten years, according to observers.

Those who survived the bombardments are now facing diseases and an epidemic explosion across the Gaza Strip, especially among displaced families who sought refuge in shelters.

These shelters – which did not shield Palestinians from the brutality of Israeli planes – did not provide a hygienic environment that would protect the displaced from the spread of contagious diseases. As usual, women and children bear the brunt of this disaster. In light of the shortage of medical supplies and the thousands injured from the war, they might not find a place for treatment. Some of them might be ashamed to even go to a hospital because they are ill, when people wounded from the war cannot find a hospital bed to lie on.

Somewhere between peace and checking on those who are still alive, there is a lot of talk and complaints about diseases, especially in areas where corpses remained for several days. Skin infections are perhaps the most prevalent diseases among the displaced, followed by the flu and tonsillitis, which are accompanied by a high fever. As soon as you enter a school shelter, you notice a number of people scratching continuously until their hands and feet start bleeding.

It is important to point out that power outages in many areas, which have lasted for more than a week, meant these areas did not get water either. This left Gazans who survived the Israeli killing machine fighting contagious diseases. Another reason behind this explosion of infectious diseases is the fact that municipalities and other authorities in charge of public hygiene have not been working for a month, given that Israeli attacks spared no one, not even paramedics.

Om Mohammed fled with her ten-member family to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school. She said all of them have scabies or skin rashes. The woman risked her life to take her children for treatment at a time when hospitals had a hard time receiving patients with non-traumatic injuries, especially with the state of emergency declared by the Health Ministry.

Om Mohammed told Al-Akhbar: “My children weren’t killed in the war but they’re going to die from the fever and the scabies… We can’t treat them and we don’t have money to buy medicine.” However, she did not blame hospitals or doctors after the horrific scenes she saw there.

Amal on the other hand, who is in the shelter with Om Mohammed, does not think this situation is acceptable. She said they should open emergency clinics inside schools to combat the diseases spreading among their children. Amal told Al-Akhbar: “Medical services should be provided to all citizens. Patients that cannot be received in hospitals can be treated here, especially that the UNRWA has medical staff, but they do not treat war-related injuries.”

A displaced woman from al-Arir family blamed others in the shelter for what has befallen them and for the chaos they are living in. She asked them to maintain the cleanliness of the place where they are staying because the lack of hygiene helped in the spread of diseases.

Health Ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qudra, said the crisis is not restricted to displaced Gazans, “but has affected a large number of people, especially with the ongoing electricity and water crisis and the garbage in the streets, which contributes to transmitting diseases to healthy people.”

He told Al-Akhbar: “What happened was an all-out war on the Palestinian people. From the start, Israel, targeted everything to damage anything that its war machine might have missed.” He warned of the poisonous gas bombs launched by the enemy in the last days of the war, which “probably transmitted infections that we have not identified. But eyewitnesses told us about the stench of these gases.”

Qudra pointed out that the sick might have either the flu or tonsillitis. He added, however, that “the most prevalent illnesses are skin infections, which require a certain environment for treatment, which can’t be done at this stage. So it is difficult to treat patients quickly.” He did not, however, point to the potential side effects if this continues much longer.

In an effort to address the situation, medical relief agencies tried to ease the crisis by sending medical teams to shelters to treat patients. But Gaza’s mayor, Nizar Hijazi, told Al-Akhbar that the garbage is a big reason behind the crisis, adding that before the war, the municipality disposed of 600 to 700 tons of waste daily outside the city.

“During the war, it was very difficult to work and during the truce, the amount declined to 400 tons daily as workers were targeted and some of them were killed,” he said. This forced them to dispose of garbage inside the city, “after Israel refused requests by the Red Cross and the UNRWA to transfer it outside city limits.”

Mounds of trash have accumulated in al-Yarmouk Square in the center of Gaza City, which Hijazi estimates to be around 30,000 tons. “This subjects the city to a serious health catastrophe in addition to the spread of epidemics and diseases, especially if it catches fire and smoke columns begin to rise in the air.”

Perhaps Israeli officials knew what the outcome of this crisis would be, given that they deliberately pushed things to this point, forcing people to leave border areas and go to the center of the city. As the cease-fire went into effect, the municipality mobilized its workers but they do not have an easy job ahead of them, especially as they are facing a shortage in materials and a number of their transport vehicles were targeted and damaged.

In addition to these hardships, from the start of the war, people have not had access to any drinking water, and sewage water has leaked onto the streets after the largest sewage plant in western Gaza was bombed. It is plant No. 1, which contains 20,000 liters of sewage water. The water treatment plant was also hit. This forced the municipality to discharge the polluted water into the sea, prompting the municipality to ban swimming in it even before the war.

Israel began its war on water by destroying more than six groundwater wells completely and four others almost completely. This damaged water networks in the neighborhoods of al-Tuffah, al-Shujaiyah and al-Zeitoun in eastern Gaza and led to water outages for days on end. People also have a problem with drinking water not getting to their homes because the only power plant in the Gaza Strip was targeted. They are forced to pump water using generators, which does not meet their needs.

As a result of this situation, Oxfam, a worldwide development organization, warned that Gazans are facing a serious health crisis despite the humanitarian truce reached between Palestinians and Israelis because the “bombing destroyed dozens of wells, pipelines and reservoirs and contaminated fresh water.” It also warned that water pumping stations have stopped working because they ran out of fuel.

Oxfam pointed out that it is working in an environment with a completely destroyed water infrastructure “that prevents people in Gaza from cooking, flushing toilets or washing hands. The current public health risk is massive.”

Nishant Pandey, head of Oxfam in the occupied Palestinian territories, said that “Gaza’s infrastructure will take months or years to fully recover.”

Pernille Ironside, head of the field office run by the UN children’s agency (UNICEF) in Gaza, said that more than 400 children have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, and almost 400,000 are traumatised and face an “extraordinarily bleak” future.

Addressing a UN press conference in Geneva by phone from Gaza, Ironside added: “Rebuilding children’s lives would be part of a much larger effort to reconstruct the Palestinian enclave once the fighting has stopped for good.”

*Due to an error in translation, the article erroneously stated that there were cases of smallpox in Gaza. The article has been edited to reflect that skin infections, not smallpox, are especially prevalent among Gaza’s displaced.

This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.

Gaza’s survivors face a battle for water, shelter and power

By Donald MacIntyre, The Independent
August 06, 2014

GAZA CITY –The biggest waste-water treatment plant in Gaza City isn’t the sweetest smelling place at the best of times. But the abnormally acrid stench and large swarms of flies testified to the sewage stagnating in its lagoons. War has stopped the plant doing the job it was built for: limiting the pollution of the Mediterranean by semi-treating the 40 million litres a day it pumps into the sea.

Gaza, which enjoyed its first full day of peace on Tuesday, has lost 1,814 people, the vast majority civilians killed as they hid from Israeli bombardments. Its ill-equipped hospitals hold thousands of patients, many suffering from horrific injuries.

But Israel’s destruction of homes and infrastructure will ensure that the possibility of Gaza having a normal existence is a distant prospect.

The sewage plant, built with funding from KFW, the German development agency was put out of action by three tank shells. The result is that raw sewage routed through the plant is now being dumped untreated into the sea.

Munzer Shublak, the director general of the coastal municipalities water utility said yesterday that an earlier strike had hit one of the lagoons, spilling raw sewage over the neighbouring agricultural land.

This was repaired but after the second bombardment he decided not to send his technicians out. Four of his team had been killed doing their jobs in Rafah and in central Gaza. “I stopped anything that might be a target for an Israeli attack,” he explained,

The shelling which his team will now assess if the present 72-hour ceasefire holds appears to have been surgically precise. Inflicting the minimum of structural damage one shell hit a big storage vat, blocking a crucial pipeline with wood and rubble, Another took out the main electrical control bay. And another destroyed the air conditioning unit designed to keep the switching mechanisms from overheating.

It’s a paradoxical measure of the humanitarian crisis engulfing Gaza that because severe water shortages have reduced consumption by many residents to well below international emergency standards, Mr Shublak estimates that actual sewage flowing from Sheikh Ejlin will in turn be much less than the normal 40 million litres a day.

For the halt to waste treatment is only part of a much wider water and sewage problem. Oxfam said last night that the destruction by bombing of wells, pipelines, and reservoirs, caused contamination of scarce fresh water with sewage and that 15,000 tons of solid waste had seeped into Gaza streets. “We’re working in an environment with a completely destroyed water infrastructure that prevents people in Gaza from cooking, flushing toilets or washing [their] hands,” the agency said,

And that in turn is only one element of the infrastructural damage inflicted on Gaza by four weeks of war, much of which UN, aid agencies and local utilities had their first real chance to assess yesterday, the quietest since Israel’s Operation Protective Edge began on July 8.

Frode Mauring, the UN Development Programme’s special representative said that with 16-18,000 homes totally destroyed and another 30,000 partially damaged, and 400,000 internally displaced people “the current situation for Gaza is devastating”.

As the agency began its assessment of the massive reconstruction needed in Gaza, Mr Mauring added that since Spring 2013 no new UNDP project in Gaza had been approved by Israel, which banned the importation of construction materials after the discovery of a tunnel under the border.

“We cannot have a situation in which it takes 20 months to get approvals from COGAT [the Israeli military’s civil affairs wing] to do construction,” he said. “The status quo is not a viable option.”

Mr Mauring said that the bombing of Gaza’s only power station and the collapse at least six of the 10 power lines from Israel, had “huge development and humanitarian consequences”. Majdi Yaghi, head of distribution for the Palestinian electric company said that the power station could take six months to a year to repair but this depended on Israel allowing the importation of construction materials.

Electricity officials complain that their maintenance engineers have been shot at when they seek to repair lines, even after co-ordination with the Israeli military.

Trond Munby, of the UNDP’s Gaza office, said in his experience of war zones this was the worst for attacks on public servants doing their job. There are also worries among some aid agencies about the willingness of donors to fund rebuilding of installations which may be attacked again by Israel in future.

Mr Mauring acknowledged that a bridge at Wadi Gaza in the central Strip, destroyed during Israel’s 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead, had still not been rebuilt.

But he was forthright in also calling for Israel to lift its bans on the exports on which Gaza’s economy depended, pointing out that jobs and economic security reduced extremism. “You don’t have to be an economist to realise that people are going to be reluctant to invest in a place which cannot trade,” he said.

UN officials strongly reject Israeli suggestions that cement imported for international construction projects was used by Hamas for military tunnel building, pointing out that while such imports were exhaustively monitored, cement and other materials were freely available through the smuggling tunnels from Egypt.