GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Jan. 28 that Israel has approved the construction of a waste recycling plant in Gaza at the former site of Gush Katif, the largest Israeli settlements before the 2005 disengagement. The report said that in cooperation with the United Nations and other agencies, the Israeli Coordination and Liaison Administration to the Gaza Strip had recently submitted a proposal to construct a UN-funded recycling facility.

Past calls to resolve Gaza's waste problem had gone unanswered because of a lack of funds or Israel refusing to allow the necessary equipment to enter the Gaza Strip due to their dual-use capabilities. Israel's green light leads one to wonder what has changed.

 According to the Yedioth Ahronoth report, the landfills in Gaza have made 90% of Gaza's groundwater unsafe to drink. It also revealed that two weeks ago, part of the Johr al-Deek landfill collapsed, sending waste cascading into the buffer zone between Israel and Gaza and heightening tensions with Hamas when the Israeli army considered entering Gaza to push the trash back into a heap. Eventually Palestinians did the job using bulldozers. In mid-January, Yedioth Ahronoth had reported on how the stench from landfills in Gaza was wafting into Israel and how the location of the dumps was creating rodent and mosquito infestations in border communities in Israel. 

Ashwaq Ghneim, head of the Health and Environment Department at the Ministry of Local Government in Gaza, explained to Al-Monitor, “The Gaza Strip suffers from the accumulation of waste which is not being disposed of in an eco-friendly way. The household waste is either being disposed of in landfills or burned.”