Wastewater pumping stations in one of Gaza’s main cities have stopped working because fuel has run out, the local authority said, expressing fears that disease could rapidly spread, AFP reports.

Tens of thousands of people displaced by fighting between Israel and Hamas have sought shelter in Deir al-Balah and city authorities said more than 700,000 people could be at risk from a “health and environmental crisis”.

“Deir al-Balah municipality announces the halt of water waste pumping stations because stocks of fuel necessary for their functioning are exhausted,” said a city statement. It predicted that “roads will be flooded by wastewater” and “diseases will spread”.

“Nineteen pits and two large reservoirs are unusable in Deir al-Balah,” Ismail Sarsour, an official with the city’s emergency committee, said before the release of the statement. He said the stations handle wastewater for more than 140 points of shelter, where tens of thousands of people have taken refuge.

The Palestinian Authority’s water department, the PWA, which is based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, said recently it had arranged for tens of thousands of litres of fuel to enter Gaza.

But Palestinian experts said the water crisis is so deep that the fuel alone would not help. Sarsour and the experts said there was also a critical shortage of spare parts to repair damaged infrastructure.