One vital supply missing from the aid convoys has been fuel. Without it, Gaza’s water system has crumbled.
“Fuel is water,” said Hall of CSIS. “Cutting off fuel is cutting off water.”
For Gazans, no power means taps have run dry. “Even if you are lucky and have a well, you will not be able to pump (water) to high floors because we don’t have electricity,” Al Shanti said.
Many of the water trucks Gazans rely on to fill water containers are unable to reach people’s homes because they lack fuel, and because of the bombardment,
Making water drinkable also relies on fuel.
All five wastewater treatment plants and two of the three desalination plants have stopped working. The enclave’s
last remaining major desalination plant, which had been shut down for almost a week, resumed operations on Saturday but is at less than 7% of its usual capacity.
“The only water people have is essentially non-potable seawater mixed with sewage,” said Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Most of Gaza’s water comes from a coastal aquifer, a body of underground water that stretches along the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula up to Israel.
Around 97% is undrinkable; it’s salty, brackish, and contaminated by untreated wastewater and pollution.
Save the Children said Monday that over 1 million children are “trapped” in Gaza with no safe place to go and warned of the devastating impacts of lacking medication and electricity to power vital health infrastructure in the enclave.
“At least 2,000 children have been killed in Gaza over the past 17 days, and a further 27 killed in the West Bank,” the aid agency
said on Monday.
Fuel means life in Gaza. Without fuel, water cannot be pumped or desalinated, generators that power hospitals – that keep incubators, ventilators and dialysis machines running and to sterilize surgical equipment – will fail.
Twelve hospitals and 32 medical centers are now out of service after Israeli strikes and fuel depletion, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza. Early Tuesday, the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza had no electricity due to the fuel shortage, Hamas said.
Hospitals are nearing collapse, operating at more than 150% of their capacity and situations have become so dire that surgeries are being conducted without anesthesia, and in some cases, under the illumination of phone lights, the Palestinian Authority health ministry added.
Around 50,000 pregnant women are struggling to access health care, with about 166 unsafe births happening daily, and more than 5,000 women due to give birth in the next month, it said.