Well, things are moving fast now here in the region…
USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore, who was just sworn in at a ceremony in Washington by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on 13 December, turned up in Jerusalem on 14 December – and then on the main road past Qalandia to Ramallah on 15 December, where she announced that USAID was going to respond “to an urgent need to address potentially dangerous sewage issues in Beit Lahiya in Northern Gaza”. USAID, she said, “will construct an emergency holding pond and provide the pumps and spare parts to operate it”.
A USAID official at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv suggested Monday that this project — to build “an emergency secondary sewage holding pond to relieve the pressure on a bigger pond” — would probably get underway in January, and would cost about $500,000.
USAID Administrator Fore traveled to Jerusalem in advance of the 17 December donor’s meeting in Paris – indicating some level of urgency in addressing the matter.
An article written by the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, Steven Erlanger, and published on 6 November, highlighted the drama of the situation: “Fahmi al-Abrak, 70, was at home on March 27 when a lagoon of human waste broke through its sand embankment and hurtled downhill, inundating this poor village of Bedouins in northern Gaza. ‘It rose to here in 15 seconds’, he said, pointing to a discolored line on the walls, four feet above ground. Five people died, drowned in the wave of waste, along with scores of goats, sheep and chickens. Nearly 1,000 people had to be taken out of the village. Now, Mr. Abrak said, ‘I’m afraid to go to sleep at night’. The lagoon disaster seemed a sort of metaphor for Gaza — overcrowded, lacking in resources, coping with makeshift answers to long-term problems. But the lagoon, which held more than 150,000 cubic yards, is dwarfed by the huge lake of sewage it was built to reduce. That lake, which itself holds sewage overflow, now contains almost four million cubic yards of water and human waste, covering about 100 acres, and it is again creeping close to the danger point. Its sand embankment was reinforced this summer, and two more outlet ponds have been dug in the sand. But more waste enters daily than is discharged, the lake is only six feet below the embankment and the winter rains are coming”… Steve Erlanger’s NYTimes report on the looming sewage lagoon is here.
The horror of the situation can hardly be imagined –poor and mightily beleagured Gazans literally drowning in a flood of human waste.
Secretary Rice told reporters aboard her plane en route to Paris yesterday that she was worried about the situation in Gaza. “Yes, I’m concerned about it, very concerned about it”, she said, noting that she hoped to get a fuller report from the USAID Administrator “who has just been in the West Bank”.
Rice told two AP writers in an interview last Wednesday that “we’re following the humanitarian situation [in Gaza] very closely and sometimes, it requires very specific actions about what kinds of equipment, medicine, food can get in. It relates, of course, to issues of electricity where the Israelis, in their own processes, have been told to be extremely careful about making certain that there’s electrical supply to Gaza. But we get reports on the situation and I know that the situation is difficult, but we don’t intend to allow it to become a humanitarian crisis”. The full transcript of the interview was circulated by the U.S. State Department.
But how Rice would define a humanitarian crisis is not entirely clear. Gisha’s Executive Director, Sari Bashi, said in a phone interview from her office in Tel Aviv today that “it is not allowed to cut civilian access to electricity, to deprive people of water or hospitals of fuel – not even a little bit”. She added “What’s happening in Gaza is very, very bad”.
Gisha’s website states that “International law does not recognize a humanitarian minimum to which one may deliberately reduce a civilian population”.
Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, was founded in 2005 (around the time of Ariel Sharon’s unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza), and recently brought together a group of Israeli Human Rights organizations who petitioned the Israeli High Court to try to stop the Ministry of Defense’s fuel and electricity cuts to Gaza.
But, as Gisha reports on its website, the High Court on 30 November “declined to intervene”.
Israel has been reducing fuel supplies to Gaza since 28 October, and a first phase of tightened Israeli sanctions against the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip went into effect on 2 December.
A decision on electricity cuts is still pending.
Gisha’s Sari Bashi said that the state was due to respond by 18 December with explanations on how it thinks the supply of electricity could be reduced without grave humanitarian consequences. The petitioners will then be given a chance to comment, Bashi says, and a further court hearing will follow, probably in January.
Fuel, electricity, water and sanitation are, of course, all intertwined in Gaza — as they probably are almost everywhere in the world.
As recently as 12 December, USAID’s Senior Deputy Assistant Adminstrator, Mark S. Ward, said in a statement before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia that: “Following the collapse of the National Unity Government in June 2007 and Hamas’ subsequent takeover in Gaza, the Secretary of State stated that the USG is “not going to abandon the Palestinians who are living in Gaza” (June 18, 2007) and will continue to help Palestinians meet their basic human needs. While activities to meet basic human needs will continue, no new activities or programs are planned for Gaza. All assistance we provide is carefully scrutinized for security concerns to ensure no foreign terrorist organization involvement”.
Asked to comment on this, the USAID official in Tel Aviv explained that the just-announced American project for northern Gaza is humanitarian aid that should not be viewed as constituting a new activity or program.
The significance of supplying pumps and spare parts to Gaza, under the current sanctions regime, should not be underestimated.
Maher Najjar of the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility said in a telephone interview today that the second of Gaza’s three big stand-by generators had just failed, “and we have no spare parts to fix it”.
This is now a minor catastrophe, Najjar explained over the phone from Gaza, that could quickly become a major one, if there is any loss of electricity – because this stand-by generator has been used to maintain operations in one of Gaza City’s major sewage pumping stations. And, there are now constant power reductions and outages in Gaza , Najjar indicated.
As an immediate emergency measure, Najjar said, “We have asked the electricity company not to cut power at all to this sewage pumping station”. But if anything happens — for example, if demand suddenly exceeds capacity — then, Najjar indicated, the system will fail — and Gaza City’s Zeitoun district will be flooded with sewage.
ajjar said that while last week’s fuel crisis in Gaza has been temporarily alleviated, there are still rolling electricity cuts. But the worst problem at the moment, he said, is the acute shortage of crucial spare parts.
“We have not received any spare parts for over five months, nearly six months”, Najjar said. “We have three containers of spare parts sitting in Ramallah”, he said. But they cannot be sent to Gaza. And, Najjar added, many letters have been sent to the Israeli authorities about this urgency of this problem, without any response so far.