Real Change News | Evidence of disrepair, warfare fill Gaza’s streets

July 15, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 32

Community & Editorial

Evidence of disrepair, warfare fill Gaza’s streets

via: Erin Cunningham, Inter Press Service. ©Street News Service: www.street-papers.org.

After war, trash collectors turn to horse and buggy

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Suliman Khodari begins his shift at 5 a.m. on one of Gaza City’s busiest streets. With his horse-drawn cart, Suliman spends seven hours every morning hauling away the rubbish left by residents and shop owners of the neighborhood. But he is not a scavenger.

Suliman is one of 150 animal cart owners currently collecting garbage for the Gaza City municipality. Two years of economic blockade and Israel’s recent assault on the territory have crippled the ability of municipalities to get rid of solid waste.

Shortage of fuel and spare parts have rendered the majority of the Gaza Strip’s garbage trucks unusable for rubbish collection — and the ones that are left require almost daily maintenance. Local governments have been forced to rely on animal carts as a result.

“Because of the siege, and now after the war, we are working in a crisis situation all of the time,” says Gaza City’s director of environment and health, Abdel Rahem Abulkumboz.

“Our work is based on the fact that we are constantly in a state of emergency,” he says.

On Dec. 27, Israel launched a three-week assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians and decimated wide swaths of infrastructure.

Gaza’s solid waste sector sustained serious damage — to its garbage trucks and their repair facilities, community trash containers, bulldozers used to flatten waste, and roads used to access three major landfills for the Gaza Strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

The Palestinian Authority told international donors in February that Gaza’s solid waste sector needs an immediate injection of $3 million to function properly over the next year.

In the Rafah municipality alone, home to 150,000 people, over $275,000 in damage was done to solid waste infrastructure, according to a rapid assessment made by the local government in March.

But nothing from the $2 billion in reconstruction funds pledged by international donors at the Sharm El-Sheikh reconstruction conference in February has been received — and high recovery costs have further impeded local governments from rehabilitating their solid waste services.

Fuel, funds and supplies from the United Nations Relief Works Agency currently sustain much of Gaza’s solid waste sector. The World Bank finances the 150 animal cart owners working for the Gaza City municipality.

“The population doesn’t have enough income to pay for even their basic needs, so how can they pay for our services?” says Mohammed Al-Halabi, director of international cooperation at the Gaza City municipality.

“Our fee for trash pick-up is eight shekels ($2) per month, and sometimes we can’t even collect that,” he says. “The disposal of one ton of solid waste costs 80-100 shekels ($20-$25 dollars). The municipality just doesn’t get that money back.”

During the war, garbage collection services came to a virtual standstill, and 22,000 tons of rubbish consequently piled up in residential areas across Gaza, attracting flies, mosquitoes and rats. Then 600,000 tons of debris, from damaged homes, businesses and factories overloaded the already weakened system in the aftermath of the war.

“The war was a disaster for our capacity to remove and dispose of waste properly,” says Al-Halabi. “We have trouble collecting and transferring normal waste. How could we possibly remove all of the rubble, too?”

Abulkumboz says the inability of municipal governments to separate hazardous medical waste from regular household waste continues to pose a major health risk to both the civilian population and to solid waste workers.

“Much of the rubble contains high levels of asbestos,” Abulkumboz says. “And it is well known that asbestos causes cancer. The children, the scavengers, the people who live near this garbage — they are all at risk.”

Al-Halabi says the landfill serving Gaza City — home to the strip’s largest population center with 550,000 of the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants — will reach its full capacity by the end of this year.

An additional landfill has been established temporarily at the center of Gaza City. “We are currently looking for funds to help the municipality purchase and prepare more land to expand the site,” Al-Halabi says.

“And eventually we will need to look toward new technologies for waste disposal, because I think it’s obvious Gaza has a shortage of land.”

But Abulkumboz says there is little use in discussing any long-term solutions for Gaza’s mounting rubbish problems as long as the municipalities are bankrupt and the borders are closed.

For now, Abulkumboz says, he and his counterparts would be content just with spare parts for the vehicles and enough fuel to allow them to collect and transfer the waste properly.

As Gazans head to the beach this summer, Abulkumboz says Gaza’s minimal solid waste resources will be stretched even further.

“All we want is to be able to get the trash off the streets and keep our people healthy. That’s it. But with what little we have now, we can’t even do that.”

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