2023-10-15 04:12:34
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — As Israel batters the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, Laila Abu Samhadaneh, 65, is worried about water.
The 2.3 million residents of the besieged Gaza Strip have no access to clean drinking water after Israel cut off water and electricity supplies to the enclave as it stepped up its airstrikes in response to a bloody Hamas attack last week.
The taps have run dry throughout the territory. When water does come out of the pipes, the flow is poor, lasting no more than 30 minutes a day, and is so contaminated with sewage and seawater that it is undrinkable, residents say.
“I don’t know what we are going to do tomorrow,” Abu Samhadaneh said from his three-bedroom home in the southern city of Rafah, which became a de facto shelter after Israel demanded the evacuation of all Gazans to the south. The woman said she rations just a few liters among dozens of friends and family each day. “We are going crazy.”
The deprivation has plunged Gaza’s people into even greater misery as Israel’s bombing intensifies a week after Hamas fighters stormed Israel’s separation fence, killing 1,300 Israelis and kidnapping dozens of people. Israel’s retaliatory strikes have destroyed hundreds of structures in Gaza and claimed the lives of more than 2,200 Palestinians.
Even as terrified families flee their homes—crammed into United Nations shelters or the bloody, chaotic hallways of Gaza’s largest hospital, fearing for their safety—the desperate search for water remains a constant.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees called the water crisis a “matter of life and death.”
If fuel and water don’t arrive soon, warned the agency’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, “people will start dying of severe dehydration.”
In normal times, the coastal enclave depends on Israel for a third of all available drinking water, the territory’s water authority says.
Its other water sources include desalination plants in the Mediterranean Sea and an underground aquifer, drained and damaged by years of overuse. When Israel cut off power to Gaza, all desalination plants closed, as did sewage treatment stations.
This has left the entire territory without drinking water. People buy increasingly scarce jugs at municipal sanitation stations, search for bottles in supermarkets or drink whatever foul liquid drips from their pipes.
Quenching thirst has become more difficult in recent days, even for those who can afford to pay for bottled water. On Saturday, Noor Swirki, 35, needed two hours to find a box with six bottles that she will try to stretch over the next few days. On Saturday she showered for the first time in a week, using a cup of contaminated tap water and splashing it on her husband and her two children before rubbing the remaining moisture into her skin.
“It’s like we’re in the stone age,” said Khalil Abu Yahia, 28, in the town of Deir al-Balah.
Experts point out that drinking dirty water and poor sanitation due to lack of clean water can lead to terrible diseases such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio. For a week now, the water along the Gaza coast has tasted like salt, residents say.
The World Health Organization states that 50 to 100 liters per day per person are needed to ensure adequate hydration and sanitation. The U.S. National Academies of Science and Medicine states that men need to drink about 3.7 liters (125 ounces) and women about 2.7 liters (91 ounces) a day to be adequately hydrated.
Among the dozens of Palestinians with shrapnel wounds in their legs and arms from airstrikes that doctor Husom Safiyah treated in northern Gaza on Saturday were 15 children, including babies, with bacterial dysentery caused by water shortages, he said.
“The situation is disastrous and will be even more so after two or three days,” said Safiyah, a doctor with MedGlobal, an organization that sends medical groups to disaster regions. He spoke as explosions erupted outside and medics around him rushed to tend to the latest influx of victims.
He said he had to go and help them.
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DeBre reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Jonathan Poet in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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