News
Bethan McKernan
Jul 08, 2015
Today marks one year since Israel began shelling Gaza, in a conflict with Hamas that killed 2,200 people, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian civilians.
Now new drone footage from Channel 4 compares video from August 2014 and June 2015, showing that many areas of Gaza which were reduced to rubble last summer still lie in ruins:
In Khan Yunis, the video shows homes that have been hastily rebuilt as makeshift shacks with canvas and tarpaulin roofs.
In many areas shelled buildings are either still standing or have been pulled down and not rebuilt.
The damage to Gaza's infrastructure has also pushed the territory's fresh water supply problem to crisis point. There is no running water in the tiny strip of land, so residents are reliant on the coastal aquifer.
Sam Masters reports in the i newspaper that the aquifer's diminishing reserves can't keep up with demand, and on top of that, aid workers say that almost 40 per cent of pumping stations and 20 miles of water pipelines were damaged or destroyed during the conflict last summer.
"Gaza's water supply is running dry. In a few years it's likely that every drop in the aquifer will be unsafe to drink without heavy treatment, and Gaza does not have the infrastructure to do that," said an Oxfam spokesperson.
Amnesty International's new project, Gaza Platform, is an interactive map of Israeli attacks on Gaza in the 2014 conflict. It uses data collected on the ground to collate text reports, photos, video and audio to document a timeline of 2,750 individual events that culminated in the death and destruction last year. Explore it for yourself below:
More: Five things we learnt from the Gaza War report
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