GAZA: Bulldozers plough through piles of waste, but angry residents find little relief as their children sift through garbage on Gaza’s streets in a growing sanitation crisis that’s adding to the misery of war. “We can’t sleep, we can’t eat, we can’t drink, the smell is killing us,” said Ahmed Shaloula, one of many displaced Palestinians, who is from Gaza City and lives in Khan Yunis.

Palestinians have faced one crisis after another since the Zionist entity began bombing Gaza after Hamas attacked communities in the entity’s south. Aside from Zionist air strikes, shelling and a ground offensive, Palestinians are crippled by shortages of food, fuel, water, medicine and functioning hospitals. Garbage is piling up in the impoverished enclave — one of the world’s most densely populated places — which has been reduced mostly to rubble. At night, people stay awake fighting mosquitoes, and some are catching diseases like scabies, Shaloula said. “We are calling on the municipality of Khan Younis to remove the waste.”

But the call for government services is wishful thinking in Gaza after nine months of Zionist bombardment, which killed more than 38,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.

Khan Yunis is the second-largest city in Gaza, home to 2.3 million people. Damage from the war and a shortage of fuel have created a waste problem, said Omar Matar, the official responsible for the removal of solid waste at Khan Yunis Municipality. “The piling up of waste has led to bad smells, spread of insects and rodents in addition to the leakage of liquids from the waste to the underground water reservoir,” he said.

The reservoir is the main source of drinking water for residents of Khan Yunis. Clean water is unavailable in most of Gaza. “This dumping land was not correctly designed to stop the leakage of waste liquids into underground water,” said Matar.

NGOs slam siege

Access to war-torn Gaza has become increasingly difficult for humanitarian groups, 13 leading NGOs warned on Monday, accusing the Zionist military of blocking much-needed aid from reaching the besieged Palestinian territory.

Denouncing “(the Zionist entity)’s systematic obstruction of aid and its ongoing attacks on aid operations”, the humanitarian organizations said that the entity had facilitated only 53 — less than half — of the 115 relief missions they had planned.

The aid groups slammed what it called the Zionist entity’s “siege tactics” in its struggle against Palestinian militant group Hamas. It said the so-called “humanitarian zone” where most of the strip’s population of 2.4 million people now reside had become “an active combat zone” and “extremely unsafe”.

The charities also criticized the bombing of United Nations schools used as shelters by displaced Palestinians. At least six schools have been hit over the past nine days. “These recent events are exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe at a time when NGOs continue to come up against the obstacles imposed by the continuation of Zionist military operations on the ground,” a press release summarizing the 13 NGOs’ views warned.

Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council were among the charities to contribute to the document. Since the entity began its ground offensive in the far-southern city of Rafah in May, humanitarian workers have faced major difficulties in delivering aid to the Gaza Strip’s south.

Tons of aid stuck

The entity’s capture at the beginning of May of the Rafah crossing, which has since been destroyed, brought aid deliveries to a “complete halt”, the NGOs added. Tons of “absolutely necessary aid” were left blocked at the crossing points in the south “due to the deterioration in security conditions”, the statement said.

More than 1,500 trucks of humanitarian aid containing medicines, first-aid kits and basic necessities were stuck in the Egyptian city of Al-Arish as a result. Meanwhile, in the north of the Gaza Strip — which has been isolated from the south by the Zionist army — aid delivery is “very limited”. Oxfam said it took it five weeks to transport just 1,600 food parcels from Jordan to Gaza — a journey it said “should take no more than six hours”.

At Karam Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom), designated since May as a priority crossing point for humanitarian aid, the situation had “deteriorated significantly since (the entity)’s offensive in May”, the aid groups said. This had made the crossing “unsafe to access from within Gaza and currently not logistically viable”.

The Zionist entity denies any famine in Gaza and accuses the United Nations of blocking aid deliveries. “Yesterday, 211 trucks entered Gaza via Kerem Shalom,” Zionist government spokesman David Mencer said on Monday. In addition, “eight trucks were collected on the Gaza side” of the Erez along with “103 from the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom”, he added. — Agencies