http://news.yahoo.com/walls-winter-rains-afflict-palestinian-towns-144516399.html
By Noah Browning | Reuters
QALQILYA, West Bank (Reuters) - Heavy winter downpours have turned some Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank into a morass of filth and flooding as an Israeli barrier blocks the waters from draining away.
In Qalqilya, a town of 42,000 in the northern West Bank almost completely surrounded by the concrete wall, Khaled Kandeel and his family huddled by an open fire in a shed as trash-laden water swelled through his pear orchard.
"Before the wall,
the water used to drain fine, and flowed down to the sea easily. They
could just flip a switch and end our suffering, but they don't," Kandeel
said, his breath steamy from the winter cold.
Israel
started building the barrier, a mix of metal fencing, barbed wire and
concrete walls, in 2002 in response to a wave of Palestinian suicide
bombings.
Drainage channels
run under the imposing ramparts but their automated metal gates are
mostly closed and now clogged with refuse and stones that block the
outflow of storm water.
The Israeli military,
citing security reasons, generally bars locals from clearing the
obstructions or digging their own channels close to the barrier.
Built mostly within
occupied land and not on the "Green Line" which was Israel's de facto
border before the 1967 Middle East War, the barrier inside the West Bank is deemed illegal by the U.N.'s International Court of Justice.
It directly impacts
the farming, grazing and environment of about 170 communities, the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) says.
Hemmed-in residents
of northern towns in the West Bank have been deprived of large swathes
of rural land, forcing poorly-regulated waste dumping closer to farms
and homes.
Driving rain could
not mask the stench of raw sewage being unloaded from a tanker on a
village road outside Qalqilya on Tuesday, its putrid contents mixing
with the brown torrent pouring past olive trees clustered on the hills.
"Raw sewage is
disposed near, or on, agricultural land resulting in the contamination
of soil and groundwater," UNRWA said in a report.
SUNK SOUQ
Planning
restrictions, inked as part of interim peace accords by Israeli and
Palestinian negotiators almost two decades ago, widely limit locals'
ability to build water infrastructure or repair damaged or polluted
wells.
But in Hebron,
whose old city is a flashpoint of conflict with Jewish settlers, rare
coordination with the Israeli military allowed Palestinian officials to
lift the concrete slabs which separate the ethnic enclaves to relieve
flooding.
"We removed the
concrete to prevent the passage of water to the old city souq, where
flooding reached up to one meter," said Walid Abu Halawa of Hebron...
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