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Ahmadullah is 60 years old. He lives on top of a hill in the battle-ravaged Kabul, which is used as a launching pad for the hundreds of rockets that are fired into the city every time civil war breaks out in Afghanistan. But, Ahmadullah has learnt to live with bombs and missiles. His toughest ordeal, today, is to push his way through the big crowd that gathers in front of a tap, about 300 metres downhill, which supplies water (mixed with waste from the shelled sewers!) to more than 100 households, along with his own. It works for only a couple of hours a day, so if he misses his turn he is doomed. He has heard that his government’s plans to dig more supply wells are on hold, till the battle at the border and within it rages on. But Ahmadullah is luckier than the 10-year-old Kamal al-Hamami and his family. Their home is in Gaza City in the West Bank, where running taps are now a distant memory. They have stopped showering and washing clothes. For drinking water, they race to a mosque — the one with a fountain — laden with containers, whenever there is a brief lull in the daily bombardment. In fact, all civic services — electricity, transport, health —- are on hold in this city, torn for years by epic conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over land and other resources. 
War rates While human history has been dominated by wars, in the modern era, conflicts within nations has been rising rapidly since 1950. Between 1950 and 1960, there were eight major battles killing 1,000 people, annually. Between 1990 and 1995 there were 27. And the figures are skyrocketing, with Civil Wars becoming a scarily frequent phenomenon in the developing countries. Wages of war In these conflicts, the human costs are not the result of direct violence. They arise from the collapse of public services and the destruction of the economic and administrative structures of a nation. This, in turn, triggers hunger, forcing people to flee from their homes, to migrate... Let us take the example of the still-simmering offensives between Gaza and Israel. Here are some excerpts from leading international news dailies that speak not of deaths, but of human-inflicted conditions that make it impossible for a fellow human being to survive. “In Gaza, the very foundation of society is being destroyed: people’s homes, civic infrastructure, public health facilities and schools”, says the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. And thousands of people are being displaced. “What began as very small, isolated numbers is now turning into a torrent,” says Aidan O’Leary, deputy director for the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees. The choice is clear. People can either stay and die, or migrate to other regions, within or outside their country borders, adding to the ever-increasing list of war refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). 
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