Oxfam Australia Media Release
- Nearly 1,700 kilometres of water and sanitation networks have been destroyed
- Big-ticket repairs of networks urgently needed but Israel baulks in approving supplies
The resumption of aid into Gaza, including fuel to operate undamaged water and sanitation facilities along with water trucking, has improved the amount of water available to people in some parts of Gaza. But the picture remains extremely bleak and dangerously critical, especially in the North Gaza and Rafah governorates, warned Oxfam today.
Fifteen months of Israel’s military assault has destroyed 1,675 kilometres of water and sanitation networks. In North Gaza and Rafah governorates, which have suffered the most destruction, less than seven per cent of pre-conflict water levels is available to people, heightening the spread of waterborne diseases.
As fragile ceasefire negotiations hang in the balance, any renewed violence or disruption to fuel and the already inadequate aid would trigger a full-scale public health disaster.
Clémence Lagouardat, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Coordinator in Gaza said:
“Now that the bombs have stopped, we have only just begun to grasp the sheer scale of destruction to Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure. Most vital water and sanitation networks have been entirely lost or paralysed, which is creating catastrophic hygiene and health conditions.
“Our staff and partners have told how people are stopping them in the streets asking for water, and that parents are not drinking to save water for their children. It is heartbreaking to hear about children having to walk for miles for a single jerrycan of water.”
In the North Gaza governorate, almost all water wells have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Over 700,000 people have returned to find entire neighbourhoods wiped out. For the few whose homes remain standing, water is non-existent due to the destruction of rooftop storage tanks.
In Rafah, over 90 per cent of water wells and reservoirs have been partially or completely damaged, and water production is less than five per cent of its capacity before the conflict. Only two out of 35 wells are currently operational.
Despite efforts to resume water production since the ceasefire, the destruction of Gaza’s water pipelines means that 60 per cent of water is leaking into the ground rather than reaching people.
Oxfam and partners’ initial assessment after the ceasefire found:
- More than 80 per cent of water and sanitation infrastructure across the Gaza Strip has been partially or entirely destroyed, including all six major wastewater treatment plants.
- 85 per cent of the sewage pumping stations (73 out of 84) and networks have been destroyed. Some have been repaired but urgently require fuel to operate.
- 85 per cent of small desalination plants (85 out of 103) have been partially damaged or completely destroyed.
- 67 per cent of the 368 municipal wells have been destroyed. Most of the private small wells cannot function due to lack of fuel or generators.
The lack of safe water, combined with untreated sewage overflowing in the streets has triggered an explosion of waterborne and infectious diseases. According to the World Health Organization, 88 per cent of environmental samples surveyed across Gaza were found contaminated with polio, signalling an imminent risk of outbreak. Infectious diseases including acute watery diarrhoea and respiratory infections – now the leading causes of death – are also surging, with 46,000 cases, mostly children, being reported each week.
Chickenpox and skin diseases such scabies and impetigo are also spreading rapidly, particularly among displaced populations in the Northern Gaza Governorate, where water shortages are most severe.
Meanwhile, with no waste collection and transport for over 15 months, more than 2,000 tonnes of garbage has been piling up in the streets every day. This toxic combination of open sewage, uncollected waste and contaminated water is creating a perfect storm for a deadly disease outbreak.
“Despite the increase in aid since the ceasefire, Israel continues to severely impair critical items needed to begin repairing the massive structural damage from its airstrikes. This includes desperately needed pipes for repairing water and sanitation networks, equipment like generators to operate wells,” said Lagouardat.
Oxfam’s own 85 tonne-shipment of water pipes, fittings and water tanks – worth over $480,000 – had been held up for over six months because it was deemed as dual-use and “oversized” to enter. Israeli authorities only finally approved the shipment this week, although it has yet to enter.
“Hundreds of thousands of displaced people across the Gaza Strip have had to resort to digging makeshift cesspits next to their tents. This daily discharge of approximately 130,000 cubic meters – the equivalent of 52 Olympic pools – of untreated sewage is contaminating the Mediterranean Sea and Gaza’s only aquifer.
“Rebuilding water and sanitation is vital for Gaza to have a path to normalcy after 15 months of horror. The ceasefire must hold, and fuel and aid must flow so that Palestinians can rebuild their lives. Lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis can only come through a permanent ceasefire and a just solution,” said Lagouardat.
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If we persist in permitting wars as we are , much of the world will be living like this! Refusing to confront climate changing activities will do it too. Complex civilisations fall faster than more ‘primitive’ ones , be warned !
And this is part of the plan: those whom the bullets and bombs didn’t kill, will die in the aftermath. It’s all part of the same genocidal action.
The inglorious Zionist stare of Western appeasement and accommodation, Israel, is a problematic invention of the West that is proving that the West’s delusional experiment has failed. Zionist Israel is the biggest threat to world peace and stability. It is becoming clearer by the day that the Tel Aviv government is intent on being the catalysts for WW3 and nuclear Armageddon.
Zionist Israel is not a country. Zionist Israel is nothing more than an expensive strategic US military base masquerading as a civilised democratic
country whose sole purpose is to protect US commercial assets in the Middle East.
As Genocide Joe Biden said
“Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
Basically Zionist Israel was the US’s useful idiot in the Middle East but now it is a nuclear armed rogue state that the US and the West has lost control of.
The atrocities and war crimes committed by Zionist Israel will never be forgiven or forgotten and will haunt the US and the West for their complicity. Zionist Israel will go down in history as the pivotal point of the US and the West’s demise.
The genocidal plan is to make the Gaza strip uninhabitable.
Much the same is happening in the West Bank with the draining of sound waters to supply Israel, denying farmers and graziers with their water supplies.
The ‘miracle’ will occur when Israeli settlers take full control. Suddenly every thing will be A OK. The Gaza as the new Riviera with the trump towers overlooking the Mediterranean, or the settlers housing complexes dotted over Samaria and Judeah.
The White Man’s Burden and Gaza (author: Michael Rosen)
Rudyard Kipling is best known
for the Jungle book:
Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Akela and the rest
and (with the help of Disney)
the Bear/Bare Necessities,
also wrote about the White Man’s Burden
a poem that urged America to
colonise the Philippines.
The burden in question was the moral duty
of the white man to civilise brown people
who, as he put it in the famous poem
about this ‘Burden’
were ‘new-caught, sullen peoples,/
Half devil and half child.’
The phrase
‘white man’s burden’
has also been used mockingly
to jeer at the ‘burden’ of pain and distress
the white man has carried
as he enslaved, exploited and genocided
his way across the world.
It’s a phrase that has occurred to me
over the last year
as the death toll in Gaza has mounted
and the pictures of flattened apartment blocks
rows of shrouded dead bodies
naked prisoners
and limbs lying amongst air-raid rubble
have reached us,
and, more recently
the images of thousands of people
on long marches home
to homes that don’t exist
while here there are some journals,
media shows and social media accounts
which have ignored this destruction,
mass killing, maiming and orphaning.
and focussed entirely on
Jewish pain,
which in theory, should be my pain too.
I have followed threads which
have meticulously reported on the personal strain
of being a Jew in London
the horror of reading signs that say
‘from the River to the Sea’
the shock of seeing
the amalgamations of Stars of David with swastikas
the terror of knowing that
Jeremy Corbyn is free to speak in London,
the factual evidence in graphs that show a line
slanting upwards like the face of the Matterhorn
showing the increase in antisemitic incidents
(though whether these do or don’t include
people swearing about Israel is not clear).
I’ve read articles
pleading the case that when the Chief Rabbi
referred to the Israeli army as
‘our heroic soldiers’
we should most definitely not take that as reason
to blame him or anyone other Jew in Britain
for anything that the Israeli army is doing wrong
– not that the Israeli army is doing anything wrong,
they often add.
It’s obviously antisemitic
they point out
to say that supporting Israel here
means we are responsible for anything
over there.
The old principle that antisemitism
is hating Jews because we are Jews
has slipped away.
Antisemitism now includes
hating Israel
or indeed caring too much
about the victims of Israel’s army and airforce.
I’ve even checked myself
when I winced watching Israeli security forces
beating up ‘Torah Jews’.
I realised I was unknowingly showing latent antisemitism
towards those security forces.
So I return to the newspaper columns
and social media posts
carefully mapping the pain of being Jewish
telling of the analogy
with what it was like to be Jewish
in Germany in 1938 at the time of Kristallacht
when 267 synagogues in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland
were destroyed,
over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed,
and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
and between one and two thousand Jews
were killed or committed suicide.
When the hostages from October 7th emerge
I read that this is like the survivors
from the concentration camps
and there is an audible shudder
at the analogy
with those pictures from Belsen, Auschwitz,
Buchenwald and the atrocious rest.
But then, as we can,
at the touch of a key on my computer
I can read, see and hear of the thousands of
mangled and incinerated bodies
in Gaza,
even if these don’t appear on the social media
posts that talk of what should be my Jewish pain.
Then,
if I voice this,
a stern correction comes
which explains that these deaths in Gaza
are the people of Gaza’s fault.
They are responsible for their own deaths.
And other people chip in explaining that
they’re not really from Gaza anyway
and that they should all fuck off to Egypt.
Given that these posts are full of talk of
Krystallnacht
(or Tsarist pogroms that my father says
his grandfather used to play out on the kitchen table)
I look back at how the Nazis
in 1938
sold German families
lovely children’s board games
where the pay off for your winning counter
was to send the Jew in his fur coat
‘nach Palestäna’
‘to Palestine’
so Germany could be ‘judenfrei’ (Jew-free)
or ‘judenrein’ (clean of Jews).
And there was a beautiful teutonic vision
of a pure Aryan ‘Übermensch’
(super-people),
cleansed of the congenitally mentally or physically
disabled
cleansed of ‘gypsies’ and ‘Jews’,
and cleansed from German history too.
‘No Felix Mendelsohn or Mahler now, grüss Gott’).
And over the top of the thousands of corpses in Gaza
comes the voice of Trump and Netanyahu
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich
and indeed
the calm media voices explaining the nuances of meaning
in Trump’s plans to ‘clean out the whole thing’
(meaning Gaza)
and this glorious vision
of Jewish lands stretching
from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river
(not at all like that racist image of
‘from the river to the sea’, please God)
and people explain on social media
that there never was a Palestine,
the ancient mosques and churches
were just some kind of arbitrary
incursion by Ottomans or Crusaders
and now that they have been
(or will be, thanks to Trump)
flattened,
they will slide from history
like sandcastles in the sea.
My analogy with Rudyard Kipling is wrong though.
His ‘burden’
I should remember was the pain of civilising brown people.
Now, I read,
that’s not the task in hand.
Now,
the pain is having to hear people
going on and on about Gaza.
I read and must understand
that every photo of a dead Palestinian
is really Jew-hate.
With that sentence
I read that
the suffering of that Palestinian person’s family
(if by luck or chance that family has survived)
is wiped away
and it’s replaced by my suffering
of having to look at the photo.
Canguro, am I glad to see you.
Sending you an email.
Is there no end to the bastardtry of these buggers?
Even blind Freddy can see the Israelis have absolutely no intention to repair or replace any of the infrastructure they so willfully destroyed – and all with one motive.
According to one detailed study (referred to in another comment), the buggers even removed the top soil from agricultural areas and completed the job by driving heavy machinery over what remained in order to compact the subsoil – having beforehand removed and destroyed all traces of any vegetation, including fruit orchards, vegie gardens and olive groves – and (unofficially I’m told), destroying any functioning water wells along the way.
How is that not calculated to remove any chance of self-sustenance?
When you place that together with destroyed homes, destroyed life-enhancing infrastructure, lack of potable water, increasing evidence of illness, starvation and disease, what do you get?
Not a problem according to Mr. Dutton.
Julian, bringing that sort of one-sidedness closer to home, I read in Crikey about attacks on Muslim women, graffiti on mosques and other forms of Islamaphobia, but not a mention in the mainstream media, nothing on the ABC, nothing in the Guardian, it is almost like that really didn’t happen, yet we are told of every bit of antisemitism which is rather real or confected.
And the dog whistle of antisemitism barks loudly in parliament. But not a whisper about the unmentionable Islamaphobia.
Thanks for mentioning that troubling aspect Bert, and as you note, not a whisper in the main press outlets. Should we be surprised at this? Unfortunately not.
I had earlier been aware of those disgusting incidents when I was directed to an article on Crikey that dealt essentially with social cohesion.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/02/17/media-double-standard-antisemitism-islamophobia-social-cohesion/
The author referred to the potential stich-up operation run by the Daily Telegraph and also to the debacle of the ABC’s handling of the Lattouf matter and concluded: “Both events typify why, for all the posturing, we should ditch the pretence we care about “social cohesion”.
The author later referred to “a double standard that speaks to how differently different sections of the community are regarded and valued.” We know that Dutton couldn’t care less about social cohesion and the Govt. appears not to be too fussed about it either.
Horrible that xstians have killed jews, under the guise of christ killers, then in 2011 bene exonerated the jews from ‘xst killers’ Time for xstians to stop their schadenfreude of jews killing women and children and apply xstian values to the slaughter of palestinians and the destruction of gaza.