Early this month, on the same day that Palestinian solidarity groups in the U.S. were celebrating their defeat of Veolia Water in St. Louis, hundreds of Palestinian residents of Gaza City, many of them children, were being sickened by raw sewage flowing in their streets.

The radical Hamas government had shut down the powerplant that drives Gaza City’s sewage pumps in order to preserve scarce diesel fuel. The shortage stems in part from Hamas’s refusal to pay the diesel fuel price charged by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is conserving supplies for its West Bank citizens.