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<a href="http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6888:narratives-under-siege-5-theres-something-in-the-water-the-poisoning-of-life-in-the-gaza-strip-&catid=65:narratives-under-siege&Itemid=209" eudora="autourl">
http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6888:narratives-under-siege-5-theres-something-in-the-water-the-poisoning-of-life-in-the-gaza-strip-&catid=65:narratives-under-siege&Itemid=209<br>
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</font><font size=4><b>There’s Something in the Water: The Poisoning of
Life in the Gaza Strip <br>
</b></font><font size=3> <br>
Thursday, 05 August 2010 00:00 <br><br>
<br>
Gaza City, PalestineThe signs which dot the beach along the Gaza City
waterfront are clear: "THIS BEACH IS POLLUTED," they read, and
yet they seem to serve only as obstacles for children running to the sea
rather than warnings to be heeded of the serious health risks associated
with swimming here. For those who care to doubt the sign's veracity, one
need only to stroll north along the beach for a couple hundred meters to
see raw sewage being pumped directly into the Mediterranean Sea from one
of the sixteen discharge sites along the coast.<a name="_ftnref1"></a>[1]
Yet thousands fill Gaza's beaches and waters in spite of the clear
dangers. For the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip,
deprived of their freedom of movement, worn down daily by the
all-pervasive effects of the Israeli-imposed closure, the sea is one of
the few sources of respite available in their lives, and for a people
that have been denied their economic livelihood, it is the only such
activity that is affordable and available. The sea plays an integral part
in the lives of this coastal community: it is a place to fish, to play
and to gather with family. The importance of the sea to the people of
Gaza cannot be understated: "without the sea there is no Gaza,"
explains Abdel Haleem Abu Samra, Public Relations Officer of the
Palestinian Center for Human Right's Khan Younis Branch.<br><br>
The intimate relationship Palestinians in Gaza share with the sea thus
makes the current state of Gaza's beaches and sea all the more
disheartening and disconcerting. Due to the effects of the total closure
imposed by Israel in 2007principle among them a complete lack of
construction materials to build new wastewater treatment facilities or
spare parts to repair existing ones, as well as an acute lack of fuel and
electricity to run necessary waste treatment cyclesan average of 20,000
cubic meters of raw sewage is dumped directly into the Mediterranean Sea
every day, estimates Monther Shoblak, Director General of the Coastal
Municipality Water Utility, although in some areas this figure reaches
70,000-80,000 cubic meters per day.<a name="_ftnref2"></a>[2] <br><br>
Beyond tarnishing Gaza’s once pristine shores, the noxious consequences
of the deterioration of the wastewater treatment operation in Gaza
resulting from the closure hold much more grave implications: the Gaza
Strip is, quite literally, being poisoned. 90% of the water available in
Gaza from its only sourcethe coastal aquiferis undrinkable, and nitrate
and chloride levels reach six and seven times the international safety
standards put forward by the World Health Organization (WHO). As the
director of the operation to keep the water in Gaza clean, it is
Monther's job to cure this poisoning, but, like a doctor without
medicine, there is little he can do while the tools he needs are denied
to him and his operation under the policy of closure, which has been
practiced on Gaza by Israel in various forms since 1991. <br><br>
Like all Palestinians in Gaza, Monther and his staff at the Coastal
Municipalities Water Utilities are forced to improvise, to make do with
very little; few others, perhaps, must do so much with so little. Monther
is tasked not only with disposing of the wastewater created by the 1.5
million people in this tiny strip of land but also with ensuring that
they have access to safe, clean drinking water. That approximately 80% of
Gaza’s population lives in refugee camps, some of the most densely
populated areas on earth where adequate infrastructure is rare and the
conditions for waterborne disease are rife, is the least of Monther’s
concerns: for more than three years now, Monther has been forced to
conduct his efforts while being deprived of the resources needed to do
so, with perseverance in place of concrete and ingenuity instead of a
supply of clean water. Monther analogizes the plight of Gaza's wastewater
treatment facilities with an old car that is forced into continual use
despite being denied the spare parts needed for upkeep: eventually the
car falls into disrepair and begins to spit plumes of jet black, highly
polluted smokea highly relevant image in Gaza, where adulterated
gasoline is the normal input into cars due to sharp restrictions on fuel
under the Israeli closure. <br><br>
Compounding the challenge facing Monther and his staff is the fact that
they must also adapt Gaza's deteriorating wastewater treatment facilities
for a rapidly increasing population which, accordingly, produces a
rapidly increasing volume of waste. Gaza’s current wastewater treatment
facilities were constructed with an operational capacity of 32,000 cubic
meters of waste a day. With a growth rate that is one of the world’s
highestan estimated 3.6% annuallyGaza’s surging population has
overwhelmed the capacity of the waste treatment facilities, and Monther
estimates that the facilities are now receiving at least 65,000 cubic
meters of waste daily. Unable to handle more than half of its intake,
much of the sewage is directly transported to the sea, where it is dumped
completely untreated. Much of this sewage washes back onto Gaza's shores,
polluting the beaches and creating toxic swimming conditions for the
countless children and adults seeking escape from the intense summer
heat. <br><br>
Nowhere is the deteriorating condition of Gaza's wastewater operation
more evident than in Beit Lahia, in the northern region of the Strip. One
of the Gaza Strip's three wastewater treatment facilities, the Beit Lahia
station receives more than 25,000 cubic meters per day, almost twice its
operational capacity. Exacerbating this problem, the facility is cutoff
from access to the sea, and thus the untreated wastewater flows directly
into the surrounding area, creating a cesspoolliterally a lake of
sewagethat now comprises approximately 450 dunums. The Beit Lahia
station stands as one of the most extreme examples of the environmental
and health disasters that the Israeli policy of closure has realized in
the Gaza Strip. The consequences of the sewage lake have been fatal and
not only because, in March 2007, the lake's embankment broke and the
subsequent flooding killed five people: the contamination of the
groundwater in the northern Gaza Strip caused by the pollution has
resulted in nitrate levels that are in some places seven times higher
than WHO's international safety standards. <br><br>
"Nitrate is a silent killer," says Monther: it is colorless,
odorless and tasteless, but when consumed at levels even much lower than
those present in Gaza, continued nitrate intake results in a reduced
oxygen supply to vital tissues such as the brain. Nitrate intake is
particularly dangerous for infants, for whom it can result in brain
damage and possibly death. Information regarding the long term
consequences for the people of Gaza in this regard is still unknown,
however, for, as one donor has said: "Nowhere else in the world has
such a large number of people been exposed to such high levels of
nitrates for such a long period of time. There is no precedent, and no
studies to help us understand what happens to people over the course of
years of nitrate poisoning."<a name="_ftnref3"></a>[3]<br><br>
The implications of Gaza’s growing population thus also present serious
concerns for the other aspect of Monther’s task, which is to provide safe
and clean drinking water to the people of Gaza Strip. The coastal
aquifer, which runs underground along much of the Strip, is Gaza’s only
source of potable water and its most important natural resource.
Historically, this aquifer has served as the lifeblood for the people of
Gaza and has given rise to the agriculture, particularly citrus farms,
for which the Gaza Strip is famous. Once, before the imposition of the
closure policy by Israel in the early 1990s, one could dig a hole within
100 meters from the beach and find drinkable water, says Monther; now, he
explains, the CMWU has been forced to issue a warning against the
drilling of wells within two kilometers of the beach, which, taken in
combination with the “buffer zone” unilaterally imposed by Israeli
Defense Forces on Gaza’s border with Israeltacitly acknowledged at 300
meters but practiced sometimes at distances much furtherleaves little
space for water extraction. <br><br>
As inconvenient as it may seem, the reason behind the ruling is even more
worrying: the aquifer is polluted, poisoned by sewage and depleted by the
rising population which it can no longer support. Only 10% of the
aquifer’s water now meets international standards for consumption, and,
if no changes are made, Monther fears that this figure may soon reach 0%.
A UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme] report published in
September 2009 stated that water extraction is roughly double the
capacity of the aquifer.<a name="_ftnref4"></a>[4] Accordingly, Monther
explains, people in Gaza are drilling more and deeper wells, further
polluting the aquifer with water from the saline aquifer to the east of
Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, and from the sea.<br><br>
Confronted with this rapidly deteriorating situation and denied by Israel
the resources with which to address it, Monther and his staff have been
forced to adopt unconventional means of tackling Gaza's wastewater
issues. In the southern Gaza cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, Monther
explains, the wastewater situation had reached a crisis level: like Beit
Hanoun, waste was being dumped directly into the land area surrounding
the cities, as the area lacked both an adequate waste treatment facility
and the materials needed to construct it. In response to the crisis,
which threatened to deny access to safe drinking water for the combined
population of 350,000, Monther and his staff turned to a practice
employed by many Palestinians in Gaza surrounded by rubble left by
Israel's latest offensive: they begin to collect aggregate from the
nearby remains of the Philadelphi Route, the border between Gaza and
Egypt which was partially destroyed in 2008 when thousands of
Palestinians flowed into Egypt seeking food and supplies. With these
secondhand supplies, the CMWU was able to construct what Monther refers
to as a "near state-of-the-art facility." Although chloride
levelsthe counterpart to the pollution problem poisoning Gaza's
waterare still as high as six times the international standard in this
southern area, Monther believes that they "are saving the city of
Khan Younis by addressing the increasing levels of nitrates and removing
the raw sewage from the densely populated urban areas."<br><br>
In such ways, Monther and his staff at CMWU continue their efforts to
keep the water of Gaza clean, but, as he admits, “we know its not enough:
the water in Gaza is deteriorating quickly. Until we find another source
of water, the population in Gaza remains at great risk.” For now, the
poisoning of the Gaza Strip continues, and, for all Gaza’s efforts and
ingenuity, there is little that can be done to stop it as long as the
closure continues. The treatment of Gaza's wastewater cannot progress as
long as Israel restricts basic building materials and adequate levels of
fuel and electricity, and, with a rising population over-burdening the
capacity of the current facilities, Gaza's wastewater treatment operation
only deteriorates. As Desmond Travers, a member of the UN Fact-finding
Mission on the Gaza Conflict, concluded in the Mission's Report: "If
these issues are not addressed Gaza may not even be habitable by WHO
standards,"<a name="_ftnref5"></a>[5] and the September UNEP report
has warned that the damage being incurred now "could take centuries
to reverse.”<a name="_ftnref6"></a>[6] As long as the closure
persists, however, the people of Gaza remain helpless to combat these
problems; they have little choice but to wait, spending their time at the
beach trying to ignore the pollution that piles up around them. <br><br>
<br>
<a name="_ftn1"></a>[1] United Nations Environmental Programme,
"Environmental Assessment of the Gaza Strip Following the Escalation
of Hostilities in December 2008-January 2009," 2009.<br><br>
<a name="_ftn2"></a>[2] UNEP Report, 2009.<br><br>
<a name="_ftn3"></a>[3] Roy, Sara. "Gaza: Treading on Shards,"
<i>The Nation, </i>17 February 2010.<br><br>
<a name="_ftn4"></a>[4] UNEP Report, 2009.<br><br>
<a name="_ftn5"></a>[5] United Nations Document A/HRC/12-48, "Human
Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the
Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict," 2009. <br><br>
<a name="_ftn6"></a>[6] UNEP Report, 2009.<br>
<br><br>
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