Sewage flood kills 4 in Gaza Strip

JERUSALEM — The earthen wall of a sewage pond in the northern Gaza Strip ruptured Tuesday, flooding a nearby village and killing at least four Palestinians, providing a tragic illustration of Gaza's crumbling public works after years of neglect and recently curtailed foreign aid to the government.

The dead in the village of Umm Nasser included a 70-year-old woman, a teenage girl, a 5-year-old boy, and 2-year-old Jamal Abu Safra, whose mother watched him sink beneath the foul brown water as she struggled to remain afloat.

"I can't swim and I started swallowing sewage," said Amal Abu Safra, 30, who held her youngest son aloft for several minutes before she lost the strength to do so. "I wanted to go under instead of him. But then he disappeared."

As the sewage spill began, children were playing in the streets, drawing a furious response from the village's roughly 5,000 residents, most of them impoverished Bedouins.

U.N. officials said about 250 people are homeless, and rescue workers are moving villagers from the low-lying areas around the ponds to higher ground near the former Israeli settlements.

A January 2004 report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declared the sewage ponds an "environmental emergency."

The ponds and adjacent treatment plant were designed to serve 50,000 people in the Beit Lahiya area, the report said, but the region's population had grown to 190,000. At the time, 110 acres had already been flooded by the sewage overflow.

After nearly four decades in Gaza, the Israeli government withdrew its soldiers and evacuated its settlements — the northern bloc of which stood just above Umm Nasser — in September 2005.

Israel recently argued in domestic court that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, a designation that under international law holds the Jewish state responsible for the welfare of Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians.

Israel declined to seek a change in Gaza's legal status with the United Nations after its departure from the coastal territory, when it pulled out thousands of Jewish settlers and shut down its military government.

The Palestinian Authority has since been hampered financially after most foreign donors cut off aid to the government in the wake of the January 2006 election of Hamas, an armed Islamic movement. Aid officials said plans to build a larger waste-treatment facility had been held up for years by perpetual fighting in the area between Israel and Palestinians and donor concerns about political instability. However, construction did not appear to have been affected by international sanctions.

Gaza City Mayor Majid Abu Ramadan, who leads a council of Gaza municipalities, blamed the collapse on lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, accusing residents of stealing the dirt and selling it to building companies for $70 a truckload. Umm Nasser is about 300 yards from the border with Israel, in an area where Palestinians have frequently launched rockets into Israel and Israeli artillery and aircraft have fired back. The situation worsened after Hamas-linked militants captured an Israeli soldier last June in a border raid, and Israel responded by invading northern Gaza.

The Israeli government still controls all of Gaza's border crossings, except for the transit point to Egypt; the strip's airspace and coastal waters; and the population registry used to assign Palestinian identity cards. The United Nations continues to designate Gaza as occupied territory.