The Useful Idiot

Curiouser and curioser! You wait decades for a "Gaza Sewage Tsunami" story to come along and then you get TWO in a Week. Its a bit like the attack on two Orthodox Jews in Golders Green in that we are being asked to believe  that this attack on Israel is completely at random and in no way anything to do with  faith hate or race hate.

Antisemitic shite at The Independent  & Orthodox Jews stabbed and police say not faith hate!

Now Jeremy "Johann Hari" Bowen has an article on "Gaza's sewage 'tsunami" . 

A five-month-old baby lay on a blanket in the shade of a hut made of metal sheets.

Thin tree branches, with leaves and twigs intact, were laced around the ends of the hut to insulate it against the hot wind that blows into the sand dunes, rolling away to the border fence and on to Israel.

The baby's mother sat with her legs tucked under her, hiding most of her face behind her black head-scarf. It flapped slightly in the breeze, and she used it to wipe her tears and muffle her sobs.

The woman's name is Aziza Abu Otayek. She wept because she was remembering the death of another baby son, one morning in March last year, just after the older children had gone to school.

Until that day their home was just downhill from a deep pond of sewage, pumped into a depression in the dunes and held there by earth walls because the water authorities in the Gaza Strip had nowhere else to put it.

Then Bowen wails!

The problem is the same one that dominates every part of life here - the conflict with Israel.

Gaza has been battered by years of fighting
 
Restrictions imposed by the Israelis - which they say are vital to protect their own people - have slowed down, and sometimes completely stopped the import of raw materials for construction like cement and piping.

Contractors have not been able to move freely. The latest problem is the lack of fuel.

Try building a sewage system in a war.

Gaza has been battered by years of fighting.

When we set up the television camera near the sewage lakes a little barefoot boy, barely more than a toddler, came up and asked if we were going to attack the Israeli positions.

He might have been asking if it was going to rain.

For him, and several hundred thousand other Gazan children, explosions are part of the soundtrack of their lives. The boy must have assumed the camera and its tripod looked like a weapon.

After that we worked faster, in case the Israelis thought the same thing.

Let us bust through Bowen's Bullshit!!! (Basically his argument is that Gaza has a Sewage Tsunami problem and its ALL because of Israel)!!

Let us use the BBC's OWN report from March 2007!

"UN warns of new Gaza sewage flood"

The UN has warned that there could be another cesspool collapse in the Gaza Strip, a day after at least five people were killed by a flood of raw sewage. Three women and two toddlers died after a sewage treatment pool broke down in the northern village of Umm al-Naser.

Rescue teams are continuing their search for more bodies.

On Wednesday, the head of the UN relief and works agency in Gaza said a larger cesspool in the area was overloaded and could collapse at any time.

'Bigger disaster'

"The real threat now comes from another [sewage] facility up there which is equally overloaded," John Ging, the head of the UN relief and works agency in Gaza, told the Associated Press news agency.

This has been a tragedy that was predicted and documented  "Except that this time it's 1.5 million cubic metres of waste water and sewage that could spill out into the area and cause an even bigger disaster," he said.

Mr Ging added that the UN had long warned that Tuesday's disaster would happen.

"This has been a tragedy that was predicted and documented. The United Nations published a report in 2004, predicting that unless action were taken, that exactly what happened yesterday would happen."

The report said that flooding was inevitable unless a new waste treatment plant was constructed.

'We lost everything'

Rescuers in Umm al-Naser are still continuing to search for more bodies and trying to clear away the sewage.

On Wednesday, Israel sent two large floating pumps to help Palestinian emergency workers lower the level of sewage in the flooded area, an Israeli army spokesman said.

The UN says their job has been made more difficult by unexploded Israeli ordnance, which was fired into the area last year and could have now been spread by the floodwaters.

Some 25 people were reported injured in Tuesday's disaster.

Hundreds have been made homeless by the flood, which some residents described as a sewage "tsunami".

One villager, Amina Afif, said: "We lost everything, everything was covered by the flood. It's a disaster."

At least 25 houses were submerged and many more damaged in the village with a population of about 3,000.

Blame game

On Tuesday, Fadel Kawash, head of the Palestinian Water Authority, told AP several sewage projects, including one in the village, had been halted after international funding dried up in the wake of the election victory of Hamas in January last year.

Hamas also blamed the flood on the withdrawal of foreign aid.

But Stuart Shepherd, the UN's humanitarian aid officer in Gaza, said the Umm al-Naser plant had not been affected by the aid boycott, noting there had long been warnings about the plant.

Mr Shepherd said foreign investment had been secured to build the treatment plant, but construction had not gone ahead because of security risks in the area.

The facility, built in the 1970s to serve a population of 50,000, was serving 190,000 people by 2004, according to the UN.

 THE PALESTINIANS WERE WARNED IN 2004 ABOUT THEIR LACK OF CAPACITY AND THEY DID NOTHING. THEY CITE LACK OF FUNDING. UN POINTS OUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CONFLICT BECAUSE THE FUNDING HAD ALREADY BEEN SECURED. THIS IS 100% DOWN TO THE PALESTINIANS BUT HARI AND BOWEN WANT TO WRITE IT DIFFERENTLY.

CAN YOUY GUESS WHY?