Sanitation Updates

By Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor

(…)  Until that day their home was just downhill from a deep pond of sewage, pumped into a depression in the dunes and held there by earth walls because the water authorities in the Gaza Strip had nowhere else to put it.

‘Wall of human waste’ 

On 27 March 2007, the walls gave way. Aziza heard someone shouting, telling her to run away. She got out of the hut, then went back in because she had forgotten her head covering. The wall of raw human waste slammed into them. It knocked her down and tore the baby from her arms. 

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Read all //news.bbc.co.uk

JERUSALEM/GAZA, 25 March 2008 (IRIN) - Design errors, a fast growing population, the halting in recent years of development projects, and restrictions on imports have rendered the Gaza Strip’s sewage system incapable of handling the enclave’s waste, experts said.

The result is the pumping of partially treated or untreated sewage directly into the sea and the seepage of dirty water into the ground and groundwater.

“The environmental situation in Gaza is bad and getting worse,” an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expert on water and sanitation said in an interview with IRIN.

Read More - IRIN

23 Jan 2008, Source Weekly

Various recent news media report from Gaza that the water and waste water treatment facilities there suffer badly from Israel’s security concerns about importing of energy, pumps, pipes and other spare parts in the Hamas controlled area. Since May 2007, 149 public wells in Gaza have had too little fuel to operate and have not been maintained due to the lack of parts. As a result 15 percent of Gaza’s population (225,000 people) get water for only two hours per day.

Furthermore, the poor quality water has not been tested for more than a year, because laboratories have been unable to import chemicals to test it. Tests carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) several years ago concluded that Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption.

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