Like most people who read and watch a lot of news, I’ve seen a fair share of photographs and television footage of the Gaza strip in my life. And unlike some of the places I’ve worked — like Goz Beida in eastern Chad or El Zapote in Guatemala — Gaza is actually a place that many people can locate on a world map, or describe to you on the basis of the images they’ve seen. I’d been expecting the stark contrast between the modern high-rise buildings and the rubble of demolished houses — the bullet holes on both a constant reminders of the ongoing violence between the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups. So I can’t say it’s the landscapes of Gaza that caught me off guard when I first arrived in the city after crossing the sandy piece of no man’s land between Israel and the Gaza strip. More than anything, it was the smells.

First came the smell of cooking oil. Nothing unusual, in principle: Many towns smell of cooked food if you drive through residential neighborhoods at lunch or dinnertime. But Gaza smelled of French fries at ten in the morning. And the smell, I soon discovered, was not exactly coming from the city’s kitchens or houses. It was coming from the rapidly dwindling number of Gaza’s cars.

“Fuel,” a local colleague explains. “The amount of fuel coming into Gaza these days has gone down since the Israeli government imposed a blockade on the Gaza strip last year.” In June 2007, Israel announced it was imposing the blockade in an attempt to stop the Palestinian armed groups’ rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

“Now that the fuel is being rationed it is far too expensive for most people who live here. So they’re driving on cooking oil instead.” Taking in my look of amazement, he smiles sheepishly. “I know — I didn’t know that it worked either. A university student came up with the idea apparently. It’s not good for the environment — but for many people, it’s the only choice these days.”

One logical consequence of the fuel cuts is smell number two: sweaty horses and donkeys. With the number of cars on the road having dwindled dramatically, horse- or donkey-drawn carts have taken their place. The streets are virtually crawling with them, particularly near one of the UN warehouses where food distribution — 80% of people here are dependent on food aid — is going on today. With each cart that passes comes a whiff of musty animal sweat.

The third smell I recognize instantly: raw sewage. Now this is a big city smell I’ve come across. Having learned to sidestep the flying toilets of Kibera and balance above the roadside sewers of Kolkata, I automatically start breathing through my mouth and figure that the smell will pass quickly. No such luck. The sewage is here to stay.

A few hours later, at a meeting with the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, I start to understand why. “There are 1.5 million people living in the Gaza strip,” the utility’s director explains. That’s more than 100 million cubic meters of sewage produced each year.

“Every day, I have to pump 50 or 60 million liters of raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. We would like to treat it of course, but the wastewater-treatment plant we have can’t cope with that much at the best of times. And like everything else it depends on fuel. Last month — throughout the whole month of April — I did not receive a single liter of fuel from the authorities because of this conflict. So what choice do I have?”

“We’re planning to build a new plant, the money from the World Bank is already there — but because of the Israeli blockade against Gaza, construction has stalled. It’s the same for all of the development projects — nothing can go ahead without parts and materials, and we’ve been waiting for almost a year for most of our parts to come in.”

Towards the end of the day, a colleague takes me down to “Beach Camp” where one of the utility’s large round pipes spews a gushing stream of raw sewage into the blue-green sea near a Palestinian refugee camp. Around 30 meters away, kids are swimming and splashing in the water as the sun sets behind them. I’m guessing it’s a scene that would leave even the beachgoers further afield — in Tel Aviv, the Greek Islands, Italy or Monaco — just a little bit uncomfortable.

“It’s crazy,” my colleague says, shaking his head. Sad, I agree. For anyone who cares about their health and the environment, the pollution that the sewage is causing — to the local drinking water (derived from the coastal aquifer shared by Israel and Palestine), to the Mediterranean Sea, and to people’s health — is deeply worrying.

From a humanitarian perspective, it’s no less of a problem — and one that international diplomats, senior UN officials and Israeli human rights groups call “collective punishment” (which, in the simple terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention refers to punishing someone “for an offense he or she has not personally committed”). Whichever side of the conflict you’re standing on, it’s not hard to see which category the splashing children, who represent around 54% of the Palestinian population, fall into.

Trying hard not to wrinkle my nose, I turn back to my colleague and start heading back to the office. Judging by the smells of the city, we have quite a bit of work ahead of us.