CAIRO, GAZA: The UN Development Programme began clearing a huge wartime garbage dump on Wednesday that has swallowed one of Gaza City’s oldest commercial districts and is an environmental and health risk.

Alessandro Mrakic, head of the UNDP Gaza Office, said work had started to remove the solid-waste mound that has overtaken the once busy Fras Market in the Palestinian enclave’s main city.

He put the volume of the dump at more than 300,000 cubic meters and 13 meters high.

It formed after municipal crews were blocked from reaching Gaza’s main landfill in the Juhr Al-Dik area — adjacent to the border with Israel — when the Gaza war began in October 2023.

The area in Juhr Aal-Dik is now ‌under full Israeli control.

Over the next six months, UNDP plans ‌to transfer the waste to a new temporary site prepared in the Abu Jarad area south of Gaza City and built to meet environmental standards.

The site covers 75,000 square meters and will also accommodate daily collection, Mrakic said. The project is funded by the Humanitarian Fund and the European Union’s Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations.

Some Palestinians sifted through the garbage, looking for things to take away, but there was relief that the market space would eventually be cleared.

“It needs to be moved to a site with a complex of old waste, far away from people. There’s ‌no other solution. What will this cause? It will cause ‌us gases, it will cause us diseases, it will cause us germs,” elderly Gazan Abu Issa said ‌near the site.