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| UN agency begins clearing huge Gaza City waste dump as health risks mount | ||
| 2026-02-12 | ||
Whatever happened to their famously overflowing poo pond? [IsraelTimes] Solid‑waste mound, estimated at 300,000 cubic meters that formed during war, to be moved to new temporary site south of city that meets environmental standards The United Nations Development Program began clearing a huge wartime garbage dump on Wednesday that has swallowed one of Gaza City’s oldest commercial districts and is an environmental and health risk. Alessandro Mrakic, head of the UNDP Gaza Office, said work had started to remove the solid‑waste mound that has overtaken the once-busy Fras Market in the Palestinian enclave’s main city. He put the volume of the dump at more than 300,000 cubic meters (390,000 cubic yards) and 13 meters (14 yards) high. It formed after municipal crews were blocked from reaching Gaza’s main landfill in the Juhr al‑Dik area — adjacent to the border with Israel — when the Gaza war began in October 2023 with the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel through the border. The Gazans started the war. Living in garbage is one result. The area in Juhr al-Dik is now under full Israeli control.Over the next six months, UNDP plans to transfer the waste to a new temporary site prepared in the Abu Jarad area south of Gaza City and built to meet environmental standards. The site covers 75,000 square meters and will also accommodate daily collection, Mrakic said in a statement sent to Reuters. The project is funded by the Humanitarian Fund and the European Union’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations.
[SeattleTimes] The earthen wall of a sewage pond in the northern Gaza Strip ruptured Tuesday, flooding a nearby village and killing at least four Palestinians, providing a tragic illustration of Gaza’s crumbling public works after years of neglect and recently curtailed foreign aid to the government. The dead in the village of Umm Nasser included a 70-year-old woman, a teenage girl, a 5-year-old boy, and 2-year-old Jamal Abu Safra, whose mother watched him sink beneath the foul brown water as she struggled to remain afloat. “I can’t swim and I started swallowing sewage,” said Amal Abu Safra, 30, who held her youngest son aloft for several minutes before she lost the strength to do so. “I wanted to go under instead of him. But then he disappeared.” As the sewage spill began, children were playing in the streets, drawing a furious response from the village’s roughly 5,000 residents, most of them impoverished Bedouins. U.N. officials said about 250 people are homeless, and rescue workers are moving villagers from the low-lying areas around the ponds to higher ground near the former Israeli settlements. A January 2004 report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared the sewage ponds an “environmental emergency.” The ponds and adjacent treatment plant were designed to serve 50,000 people in the Beit Lahiya area, the report said, but the region’s population had grown to 190,000. At the time, 110 acres had already been flooded by the sewage overflow. After nearly four decades in Gaza, the Israeli government withdrew its soldiers and evacuated its settlements — the northern bloc of which stood just above Umm Nasser — in September 2005. Israel recently argued in domestic court that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, a designation that under international law holds the Jewish state responsible for the welfare of Gaza’s 1.4 million Palestinians. Israel declined to seek a change in Gaza’s legal status with the United Nations after its departure from the coastal territory, when it pulled out thousands of Jewish settlers and shut down its military government. The Palestinian Authority has since been hampered financially after most foreign donors cut off aid to the government in the wake of the January 2006 election of Hamas, an armed Islamic movement. Aid officials said plans to build a larger waste-treatment facility had been held up for years by perpetual fighting in the area between Israel and Palestinians and donor concerns about political instability. However, construction did not appear to have been affected by international sanctions. Gaza City Mayor Majid Abu Ramadan, who leads a council of Gaza municipalities, blamed the collapse on lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, accusing residents of stealing the dirt and selling it to building companies for $70 a truckload. Umm Nasser is about 300 yards from the border with Israel, in an area where Palestinians have frequently launched rockets into Israel and Israeli artillery and aircraft have fired back. The situation worsened after Hamas-linked militants captured an Israeli soldier last June in a border raid, and Israel responded by invading northern Gaza.
Related: Poo pond 03/05/2025 Aiming to stymie Trump’s ‘Riviera’ vision, Arab leaders endorse $53 billion Gaza plan Poo pond 02/15/2025 Arab countries scramble to offer Trump an alternate proposal for post-war Gaza Poo pond 01/11/2024 Al Jazeera 'journalists' in Gaza were terrorists: IDF presents evidence | ||
| Posted by:trailing wife |
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| Posted by: SteveS 2026-02-12 11:46 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-02-12 00:44 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-02-12 00:37 |