Despite international treaties prohibiting occupying
powers from making use of occupied territories for its own benefit,
Israel has decided to transfer garbage beyond the Green Line and dump
it in the West Bank.
The dump operators plan to deposit some 10,000 tons
of garbage from Israel every month in the Abu Shusha quarry, the
largest in the West Bank.
According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, pollution
experts say that dumping such amounts of garbage into the Kedumim
quarry – located between the Kedumim settlement and Nablus – will
jeopardize Palestinian water sources.
In the last few days trucks and bulldozers have been covering the
quarry’s floor with brown soil to turn it into a garbage dump.
Transferring Israeli garbage to the West Bank will be much cheaper than taking it to a site in Israel.
Experts warn that the dump would jeopardize the
Mountain Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater sources in Israel and
Palestine.
‘We are dealing with a double crime,’ says MK Yossi
Sarid, former environment minister. ‘On the one hand, Israel is
preventing the Palestinians from making use of the quarry and its
resources, and in exchange we are giving them the Sharon’s garbage. I
believe this is a violation of international treaties.’
