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Gaza's ticking sewage bomb

Israeli expert and professor Eilon Adar warns that the electricity crisis in Gaza could provoke an ecological disaster both in the Strip and in Israel.
A boy looks at Palestinians as they ride a horse cart on a street flooded with sewage water from a sewage treatment facility in Gaza City November 14, 2013. Gaza municipality said they could not operate the sewage treatment facility due to shortages in fuel and power. Gaza's lone power plant shut its generators on November 1, 2013 due to a fuel shortage, a move that will likely increase already long blackout hours in the impoverished coastal territory run by the Islamist Hamas group. Power is provided to di
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Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman keeps insisting that Israel will not supply Gaza with free electricity. He reiterated this in a June 15 interview with the Al-Munaseq website of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), established 10 months ago to provide a direct line in Arabic to the Palestinians, above the heads of their leadership. Liberman explained that Hamas collects 100 million Israeli shekels ($28.3 million) in annual taxes from residents of the Gaza Strip but uses them to fund terror activities rather than the enclave’s education and health systems and its crumbling water infrastructure.

But Liberman’s position has generated criticism within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with senior officers telling Al-Monitor that the Defense Cabinet’s decision to scale back power supply to Gaza (with Liberman one of its main instigators) could result in a military conflagration with Hamas.

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