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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 4th,
2009 - Environment Emerges as a Major Casualty |
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Environment Emerges as a
Major Casualty By Erin Cunningham Inter Press Service May 4, 2009 Gaza City - Countless fruit
groves across the Gaza Strip are now gone, entire farms bulldozed. The
remains of thousands of destroyed homes emit toxic asbestos, while
dilapidated infrastructure dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. An
already deepening environmental crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip has been
further compounded by the recent war. Throughout the three-week
Operation Cast Lead, Israel targeted almost every aspect of the coastal
territory's infrastructure. Homes, businesses, factories, power grids, sewage
systems and water treatment plants were reduced to piles of rubble across the
Gaza Strip. According to a preliminary
assessment of environmental and infrastructural damage made by the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Israel's assault not only exacerbated
Gaza's existing hazards, but created new ones by contaminating both land and
urban environments and leaving unprecedented amounts of debris in its wake. The United Nations
Environmental Programme (UNEP) announced last month it would send a team of
post-conflict experts to the Gaza Strip in May to follow up on the issues
that pose the greatest threats to the Gaza population. Prior to the war, Gaza's
infrastructure languished under three years of sanctions and a further 18
months of a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade that prohibits the import of all
but "essential" goods into the Gaza Strip. Many areas of Gaza,
particularly the sprawling refugee camps, lacked proper sewage systems. Where
they did exist, they often ran on generators or rationed electricity. A ban
on materials required for their maintenance, including cement, steel and
pipes, left them in a state of disrepair. A report released by the UN
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) just ten days
before the launch of Operation Cast Lead stated that at least 80 percent of
the water supplied in Gaza "does not meet the World Health Organisation
standards for drinking. "Much needed
maintenance is impeded by a lack of pipes, spare parts and construction
materials. The resulting degradation of the system is posing a major public
health hazard," the report reads. Restrictions on materials
and goods left at least 70 percent of Gaza's agricultural land without
irrigation, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), while
local authorities were being forced to dump approximately 70 million litres
of raw sewage into the sea each day. Fuel shortages made garbage collection
infrequent at best. During the assault, Israeli
bombs hit the already fragile sewage and water treatment systems, causing
drinking water and raw sewage to mix across some of the most populated areas
of Gaza. Tank shells hit the strip's
largest wastewater plant in the Sheikh Aljeen area of Gaza City, sending sewage
cascading directly into neighbourhoods, farms and into the sea. Forty percent of the rooftop
water tanks in Khan Younis were damaged or destroyed, and four water wells
were destroyed completely in Gaza City, Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya, according
to the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) cluster group that works under
OCHA. "After the war, the
major impact is being felt in the northern areas of Gaza, where most of the
water networks were destroyed," says Najla Shawa, WASH's information
manager in Gaza. "In Khan Younis as well, only 30 percent of the
governorate is being served by a sewage network." Ten million more litres of
raw sewage is now being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea each day than was
prior to the war, WASH says, posing a threat to coastal marine life and
Gaza's fisheries. Israeli missiles also
targeted factories in urban-residential and rural areas, releasing
potentially toxic chemicals into both the air and soil. The piles of rubble
that continue to mark Gaza's landscape are said to contain large quantities
of asbestos, a carcinogenic mineral fibre used commonly in construction. "The demolition waste
created by the latest hostilities potentially contain hazardous materials
such as asbestos," a representative of the UNEP's Post-Conflict and
Disaster Management branch told IPS on telephone from Geneva. "High levels
of exposure to asbestos have been linked to lung cancer." Over 20,000 buildings and
5,000 homes were destroyed, according to local authorities. Some 600,000
metric tonnes of rubble has yet to be cleared as a result of the siege, with
much of the debris having been bulldozed into the soil by Israeli tanks. Gaza's soil will also be
affected in the long-term by Israel's use of white phosphorus shells
throughout the war, says Sameera Rifai, representative of the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. "The soil of the
agricultural land is now polluted by the weapons the Israelis used,
particularly white phosphorus," Rifai told IPS. White phosphorus, a chemical
incendiary agent, can remain unchanged in soil sediments and in the bodies of
fish for many years, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and
Disease Registry. Samples of Gaza's soil
tested positive for white phosphorus in February, according to studies done
at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey. The war weakened even
further the capability of municipalities to collect rubbish, says Palestinian
environmental activist and researcher for Friends of the Earth Middle East,
Basil Yasin. Refuse and solid waste continue to line the streets of Gaza, and
the strip's three major dumping sites are at full capacity, the UN reports. As long as the blockade is
in place, however, and Gaza is deprived the proper materials it needs to
rebuild, environmentalists are sceptical much can be done to address the
strip's increasing environmental problems. "It is a continuous
crisis, not just the one war, that is constantly preventing the Palestinians
from developing sustainable projects," Shawa told IPS. "Mainly this
includes a lack of access to materials, which prevents the water networks and
sewage plants from being constructed." "In the last two
months, just two or three containers of water pipes were allowed into Gaza by
the Israelis," she said. Shawa also says the
so-called "buffer zone" Israel has created unilaterally inside Gaza
is hindering environmental clean-up and assessment in the post- war period. "People just cannot
access areas in the east and northern parts where most of the sewage plants
are located," she says. "Municipal authorities are unable to reach
areas to test the water or soil for sewage levels." The UNEP says environmental
stability is crucial to establishing long-term peace in any conflict. "Significant progress
in terms of the environment cannot be made as long as the borders remain
closed," says Rifai. "If we want to develop
Gaza and sustain its natural resources, the closure should end and there
should be free movement of people and materials," says Rifai.
"Otherwise, there is no point." (*This story is part of a
series of features on sustainable development by IPS - Inter Press Service,
and IFEJ - the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.) External link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46709 |