Water pollution reaches catastrophic levels in Gaza The 34-year-old had started to do the laundry but the supply of water at her home ran out. And though he had spent a long day at school, her son Ahmad, 11, went back and forth nearly half a kilometer a dozen times to fetch buckets of water from a truck near the municipality building in Khan Younis , where the family lives. The laundry had to be done. Mother and child have gotten used to this routine. “The norm is not to have water during the day,” Abeer told The Electronic Intifada. “It is very tiring for my child to fill a bucket and carry it at least 400 meters like this.” Frequent power cuts in Gaza have made it impossible to provide homes with running water all day. With summer approaching, moreover, Gaza is threatened with a water scarcity crisis that has been compounded by successive Israeli military assaults and a nearly 10-year-old blockade. Muhammad Abu Shamala, an official at the Khan Younis water plant, de