Thousands of Palestinians flock to the beaches in Gaza
despite knowing it is heavily polluted. Deprived of movement beyond the tiny
coastal territory, the sea—to which Gazans have a deep cultural tie—is often
their only chance to escape the psychological burdens of occupation.

Gaza City, Palestine—The 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.[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.

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
2007—principle 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
cycles—an 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.[2]

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
source—the coastal aquifer—is 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.  

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 smoke—a
highly relevant image in Gaza, where adulterated gasoline is the normal input
into cars due to sharp restrictions on fuel under the Israeli closure.

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 highest—an estimated 3.6%
annually—Gaza’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.  

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 cesspool—literally a lake of sewage—that 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.

“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.”[3]

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 Israel—tacitly acknowledged at 300 meters but
practiced sometimes at distances much further—leaves little space for water
extraction.

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.[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.

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 levels—the counterpart to the pollution problem poisoning
Gaza’s water—are 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.”

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,”[5]
and the September UNEP report has warned that the damage being incurred now
“could take centuries to reverse.”[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.