Four children killed in five days; a well serving 4,000 damaged
The UN children's agency says five more children were left with lasting injuries on Tuesday, and that a strike wrecked a well and desalination unit at Deir al-Balah.
Four Palestinian children were killed by Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip over a five-day period, the United Nations children's agency said in a statement relayed through the UN humanitarian coordination office. The youngest was two years old and the eldest 16, and each died in a separate attack. One of them had been wounded in a strike the previous week and died later of those injuries.
Five more children were hurt on Tuesday alone, the agency said. They were aged between eight and 17, and were struck by live fire or by shrapnel in the aftermath of strikes. The agency described what they were left with as injuries that will change the course of their lives.
A water well and a desalination unit that the agency supports were badly damaged on Monday at Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the Strip. More than 4,000 people had been drawing their water from that one point. Aid organisations working in the area have gone back to bringing water in by tanker from wherever else it can be sourced.
Trucking is what agencies fall back on when a fixed water point stops, and it does not substitute for one. A well runs continuously and reaches households through pipes already in the ground; a tanker arrives on a schedule that depends on fuel, on a passable road and on clearance to travel, and what it carries is rationed by the size of the tank. Every damaged point pushes more of a district's supply onto a system that is already running at its limit.
Fuel is the link between the two problems, and it is not moving safely either. An explosive munition went off roughly 30 metres from a United Nations convoy that was carrying fuel out of the Kerem Shalom crossing, the agency said, as the vehicles crossed the line dividing Israeli-held ground at Rafah.
Pumps, desalination units and the tankers themselves all run on that fuel. A blast beside the convoy that carries it is not a separate incident from a well going out of service — it is the same shortage arriving by another route, and it reaches the households at the end of the pipe either way.