Due to the shortage of power supply and the intermittent power outages in the besieged Gaza Strip caused by the Israeli blockade, municipalities in the coastal enclave started today pumping sewage into the sea, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
For more than three weeks now, Israeli occupation authorities have shut down the Karm Abu Salem border crossing with Gaza, the only gate through which Israel allows the entry of basic commodities into the Strip, including badly needed fuel and gas.
#Gaza municipality just declared that the sewage treatment plant is unable to functin due to the electricity crisis and for that they are going to have to pump the sewage water directly into the sea.
Here goes the only place we look forward to going to in the summer.— Aya Isleem
#Gaza (@AyaIsleemEn) May 30, 2021
This has incapacitated the ability of the local sewage treatment plants to function as usual, forcing municipalities to start getting rid of the sewage into the sea despite the pollution and natural dangers it will cause.
The Gaza Electricity Company (GEC) said it was grappling with huge financial and physical difficulties getting fuel for the only power plant in Gaza, given the ongoing Israeli shutdown of the Karm Abu Salem border crossing and the ensuing shortage of most badly needed supplies.
As a result of the lack of fuel needed for the only power plant in the Strip, the company was forced to shorten the average time of power supply to each household in the coastal enclave to a daily average of no more than four hours.
In Gaza, the electricity comes for an hour or two during the day… and most of the time we live in the dark
— Aya Isleem
The company stressed that the severe shortage of maintenance materials will prevent it from proceeding with carrying out the electrical reparations, as it pointed to its urgent need to obtain such materials.
It held the Israeli government direct responsibility for the lives of thousands of civilians and the collapse of the health system and the wastewater sector, as thousands of cubic meters of untreated wastewater is discharged into Gaza’s environment, infiltrating and polluting the coastal aquifer as well as Gaza’s seashore.
(WAFA, PC, Social Media)
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