GAZA CITY, 27 July 2006 — The foul stench of untreated sewage, an invisible vapor oozing from stagnant cesspits, overpowers the approach to the Gaza Strip’s forgotten waste treatment plant.

The plant, “a development project” financed by the German government, has not treated sewage since Israel bombed the territory’s only power plant four weeks ago on June 28, plunging the coastal strip into regular blackouts.

With world attention focused on Israel’s war in Lebanon, Gaza has been largely ignored. No one from the international community has come to breathe the stench of untreated sewage, says Mohammed Masoud, a plant employee.

While US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was “important to end the Gaza crisis,” on the morning that eight Palestinians, including a three-year-old girl, were killed by Israeli strikes, international crisis talks in Rome were to focus on Lebanon.

With the 1.4 million residents in one of the most densely populated regions in the world coping with electricity on average only six to eight hours a day, power-dependent water wells and waste management units are in jeopardy.

Palestinians are struggling to wash; food cannot be adequately preserved; cases of diarrhea have increased by 160 percent, UN officials say.

“I’ve been here for three years and don’t think I’ve ever seen people suffering so much,” said UN humanitarian officer Stuart Shepherd.

“Clearly the media now is focused on the northern border,” he said, referring to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon.

Trying to be brave, eight-year-old Amjad Nassir lies on a bed on a dirty balcony just off the surgical ward at the Al-Shifa hospital surrounded by relatives and shrieking at the thought of seeing another doctor.

On July 17, he took an Israeli bullet in each leg when he went to collect his sister during Israel’s recent incursion in northern Gaza.

“The Israelis are bulldozing our houses and shooting at children in the street. I hate them. When I grow up, I will fight them,” he says listlessly, uninterested in a giant box of chocolates, his leg in danger of amputation.

His father Abdel Khader says Amjad has been recommended for treatment in Egypt, but Gaza’s borders have been basically closed since June 25, when Palestinian militants killed two Israeli soldiers and snatched a third in a cross-border raid.

More than 120 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded in Israel’s ensuing offensive, launched to retrieve the soldier and stop rocket attacks.

Ambrogio Manenti, head of Gaza and the West Bank for the World Health Organization, said less than 10 percent of primary care clinics have generators which in any case are liable to “break down sooner or later.”

Fuel supplies provided by the European Commission to hospitals will not last more than a month, Manenti says.