Sea once provided a breath of fresh air for Gaza. Now it stinks.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip: The beach has long provided much needed relief for the 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip, cut off from the rest of the world. They come to swim, play soccer, relax, or as many poetically put it - speak to the sea.

“It’s like talking to a friend, one that won’t gossip,” said Etaf Eleiwa, emerging from the waves. “It washes away the stresses and the problems.”

But the usually packed beaches are less crowded this summer. The brown hue that stains the water for several hundred meters out to sea makes clear why, as does the putrid stench that punctuates a drive down the coast.

Some 100,000 cubic meters of raw or partially treated sewage have flowed into the sea each day since early summer, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked Israel to cut the power supply to Gaza amid a worsening feud with Hamas, the militant movement that controls the enclave. The power shortage means that sewage treatment plants can’t function.

The pollution is so bad that Israel has shut down neighboring beaches for safety reasons and called on the Palestinian Authority to find a solution. President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, raised the issue in a speech in New York last week, saying the untreated wastewater was “imposing unnecessary hardship on both sides.” But for Gaza, the polluted waters compound the wretchedness for residents already strangled by restrictions on movement and trade by neighboring Israel and Egypt.