Desperate search: Gazans scour ruins for water

JABALIA, Palestinian Territories — To get his family the water they need for drinking, bathing and laundry, Ahmed al-Shanbari steels himself for a lengthy search through the north of the Gaza Strip.

Shanbari said most of the wells near his makeshift shelter in the Jabalia refugee camp have been destroyed.

And the water distribution network barely works after more than nine months of war that has devastated Gaza's infrastructure.

Water was already scarce before the conflict erupted in October, and most of it was undrinkable. The 2.4 million population relies on an increasingly polluted and depleted aquifer, humanitarian agencies say.

To collect what little of the fetid supply remains can take Shanbari four hours in sweltering heat.

He sets off with his three children, buckets in hand, weaving through mounds of rubble and trash in search of a working spigot or an aid agency hose connected to a water truck.

"We are suffering greatly to obtain water," he told AFP.

Shanbari said the situation has worsened since heavy fighting broke out in Jabalia in May between the Israeli army and Hamas.

"After the last incursion, not a single well remains," he said.

'Exhausted' 

The UN humanitarian office OCHA said most of Gaza's groundwater was contaminated with sewage even before the war. More than 97 percent was unsafe to drink.

Today, many aid groups describe the situation in Gaza as "catastrophic".

For weeks, Palestinians in Gaza have told AFP journalists about the intense thirst that drives them to delirium, their dreams of a cup of tea and the humiliation of being unable to wash.

For the Shanbari family, water is so precious they try not to spill a single drop after finding it.

From the jerrycans they haul home, they carefully transfer the water into basins for cleaning dishes and pitchers for bathing.

The parents say they are "exhausted" by the constant struggle to get the barest of necessities, and their children are sick.

"All my children have fallen ill, they're suffering from kidney failure, jaundice, itching, cough," said Shanbari. "I don't know what to say, and there aren't even medicines available in the north."

Not far from the Shanbari home, huge puddles of sewage, sometimes as big as ponds, cover the roads.

Inoperable 

Even if he could locate a well with water, Shanbari said there is no fuel in the north to run the pumps needed to extract it.

Wastewater treatment plants are also reportedly shutting down because of the lack of fuel and fighting.

An expert on water infrastructure in the Gaza Strip described the territory's water distribution system as effectively inoperable.

Only a ceasefire could get it back up and running again, he said, given the need for spare parts and experts to access the stations and wells.

The Israeli military on Sunday maintained that water collection points were accessible in the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, to which it has ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to move.

But people are afraid to go there after Israeli strikes on Al-Mawasi killed at least 92 people and wounded 300 on July 13, according to the health ministry in the territory.

Israel, UN agencies and the Palestinian Authority have all raised the prospect of resupplying electricity from Israel to a desalination plant and a water treatment plant in Gaza.

But the local electricity distribution company said the line was still too damaged to distribute power.