September 18,
2024
In late 2020, a
report titled Saving Gaza Begins With Its Waterstated:
The water crisis
in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the
more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave... The Coastal
Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is
experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline
groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.
A woman carries a water container in an
area sheltering displaced Palestinians, in Khan Yunis in the southern
Gaza Strip, on July 24, 2024. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
Fast forward to
2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced
closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of
fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.
The authors of
Saving Gaza Begins With Its Water end on a cautiously positive note. “The
crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise,” they wrote, ...“because Gaza’s
water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual
benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in
isolation” because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.
But this
affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been
annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any
major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of
Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the
recent polio virus. At the current rate of killing and death, 15-20% of Gaza’s
people could be dead by the end of the year, a United Nations expert stated and
almost entirely exterminated within a few years.
Prior to the
current war, Gaza had more than 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce
potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the
drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel
to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them.
Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5% of typical levels.
With no power to
run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through
the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By
December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under five in Gaza jumped
2,000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to
die from the illness than from Israeli military violence.
More than
three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to
southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of
Israeli bombing. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza,
there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no
running water.
Every human
being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably
described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes), and
scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American
trauma surgeons, who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis
situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like
Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Women and their children are its gravest victims.
Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without
anesthesia. More than 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.
Recently members
of the Uncommitted National Movement spoke at a press conference during the
Democratic National Convention and accused the Biden administration of
“hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing
the weapons massacring Palestinians in Gazan. At the same conference, American
doctors who had volunteered in Gaza pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an
arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that
the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has
seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”
Impacts of War
on Women
As of early
2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience
menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads,
toilet paper, soap, running water, and toilets because of the war nor privacy
to manage menstrual hygiene. These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at
grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections. The challenge of
trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women
who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are
going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.
By early March
2024 Relief/Web reported: There has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the
more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women
give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities
to deliver their babies. Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning
of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.
Although mothers
and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last,
less, and least.
What can be
done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their
totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with
“cooperation, coordination, and courage, it is not unachievable.” But first the
war must be ended.
Israel has
sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling
750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming
Palestinian land by force, enforcing apartheid conditions for Palestinians in
Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in
security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that
guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on
the land of Palestine for thousands of years. Without justice—the U.S. ending
its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent cease-fire, the U.N.
recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza
with supportive countries—there can be no peace.
Jake Johnson
Several news outlets confirmed late
Tuesday what was widely suspected: Israel's military and intelligence services
were behind the explosions of pagers recently purchased by the Lebanese
political party and militant group Hezbollah.
The explosions, reportedly set off
earlier Tuesday by a message that appeared as if it was from Hezbollah's
leadership, killed at least 11 people—including an 8-year-old girl—and wounded
thousands more.
Citing both an unnamed former
Israeli official with knowledge of the operation and an anonymous U.S.
official, Axios reported that "Israeli intelligence services planned to
use the booby-trapped pagers it managed to 'plant' in Hezbollah's ranks as a
surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah."
"But in recent days, Israeli
leaders became concerned that Hezbollah might discover the pagers," the
outlet continued. "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his top
ministers, and the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence
agencies decided to use the system now rather than take the risk of it being
detected by Hezbollah, a U.S. official said."
A spokesperson for the U.S. State
Department publicly denied that the Biden administration was involved in the
attack or aware of the operation in advance.
Heidi Matthews, an associate
professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, wrote Tuesday that
"each explosion constitutes an indiscriminate attack," pointing to
video footage of a pager detonating in a crowded market.
"Under these
circumstances," Matthews added, "this is an act of terror."
The New York Times reported Tuesday
that Hezbollah ordered thousands of pagers from the Taiwanese manufacturer Gold
Apollo, but the company denied making the devices. According to the Times,
which cited unnamed officials, Israeli operatives "tampered with" the
devices "before they reached Lebanon," planting in them "as
little as one to two ounces" of explosive material and a switch "that
could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives."
Heightening fears of a broader
conflict, Hezbollah pledged Tuesday to retaliate against Israel over the
attack, which reportedly injured Iran's ambassador to Lebanon as well as
Hezbollah fighters and medics.
The Guardian's Andrew Roth noted
Tuesday that just "a day before the coordinated sabotage, Amos Hochstein,
a senior adviser to [U.S. President] Joe Biden, was in Israel urging Benjamin
Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials against an escalation in
Lebanon."
Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged
cease-fire negotiations with hardline demands in recent weeks as the Israeli
military—heavily armed by the U.S.—continues to assail the Gaza Strip.
"While U.S. officials have said
that the basis for peace along Israel's northern boundary with Lebanon would
come through a cease-fire in Gaza, that agreement has proven elusive and
appears no closer to fruition," Roth wrote Tuesday. "The White House
had hoped that a period of quiet around Israel would allow for cease-fire
negotiators to achieve a breakthrough, as intermediaries shuttle between Hamas
and Israel to thread the needle of both sides' complex demands regarding a
hostage exchange and territorial claims."
"That period of quiet has now
been shattered with a breathtaking act of subterfuge and Hezbollah has vowed to
retaliate," Roth added.
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