Bromberg says even before the war, Israel’s restrictions on what is allowed into Gaza meant the territory’s sewage plants were out of date.<\/p>\n
“One of the reasons why modern sewer stream plants weren’t completed in Gaza was because in order to build and run [them] you needed equipment that the Israeli military has defined as dual use – that could be used by Hamas as a weapon,” he says, giving the example of cement.<\/p>\n
Edo Bar-Zeev, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University, called what has happened an “unexpected mega event”.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been in the field of sampling ocean water for around 20 years or so and it’s definitely unusual,” he said. “In most cases it comes and goes in a few days, maybe a week… and here it’s held on for a while.”<\/p>\n
The six plants, which generate more than 60% of Israel’s drinking water, were hit by what Lior Gutman, spokesman for Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, called a “huge carpet of microorganisms”.<\/p>\n
Some farmers were affected, although the majority of those who use recycled water for irrigation did not face any shortages. Neither did 99% of households, Gutman said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bromberg says even before the war, Israel’s restrictions on what is allowed into Gaza meant the territory’s sewage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-773557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}