Yussef Al-Jayar jolted awake this week when gallons of raw sewage spewed out of the pumping station next door and started to seep under his door and into his mattress. "We had to grab buckets and get the neighbours to help bail us out," the 74-year-old Palestinian said at his house in Gaza City, pointing to a mark about a metre above the floor where the rancid water reached. "It stank." Jayar and his family have just about scraped all the black slime off their walls since the main pipe burst at Gaza City's water pump no. 7, flooding seven streets, 200 homes and a vegetable farm with human waste. Gaza's creaking sewage system is the latest casualty of Israeli sanctions aimed at getting Hamas to halt militant rocket fire from the impoverished territory. Ancient pumps are badly in need of repair, but spare parts are hard to come by because of Israeli restrictions. There is not enough fuel for generators and the electricity needed to power water pumps is intermittent, Palestinian water officials and aid groups say. "It needs a complete overhaul," John Ging, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, said of the sewage system. Israel largely closed Gaza's crossings to all but humanitarian goods in June after Hamas Islamists seized control of the territory. It tightened the cordon last week, blocking fuel needed to run Gaza's power station and plunging parts of the territory into darkness. Under heavy international pressure, Israel allowed fuel for the plant back into Gaza on Tuesday. Defence Ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror said the metal pipes and wire needed to repair pumps and generators had been banned for fear militants would use them to assemble makeshift rockets. He said Hamas could ease the burden for Gaza residents by stopping the missiles that pound southern Israeli towns. "The rights of the people of Gaza are in the hands of Hamas," he said. WAVE OF WASTE The result is dirty water, and sometimes no water. Officials at the local Palestinian water utility said more than half of Gaza's 1.5 million people had no running water at the height of this week's blackout and even on a normal day, supply was patchy. Last year, five people drowned in a wave of raw sewage when an overflow near a sewage treatment plant in the northern Gaza Strip burst its banks and spilled into a village. Middle East envoy Tony Blair is backing a project to upgrade the system. In the rest of Gaza, local water official Monther Shoblak, who runs the Western-backed Gaza Emergency Water Project, is trying to keep the system running by shuttling fuel and generators from outlying pumps to sites in built-up areas. As a result, three pumps near the coast now discharge 30,000 cubic metres of raw sewage directly into the sea every day. At the Beach refugee camp near Gaza City, brown water gushes from a rusty pipe and the stench wafts along the seafront. The fishermen who normally line the shore are staying at home because there are no fish. "It's not nice, but we decided polluting the sea is better than polluting people," said Shoblak. (Additional reporting by Adam Entous in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Andrew Roche)
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