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<h1>Ending Water Apartheid in Palestine</h1>

<p>As the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/what-does-israels-declaration-of-war-mean-for-palestinians-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli assault on Gaza</a> enters its sixth month, the enclave’s population of about 2 million is struggling to survive with little access to life’s most basic necessity: water.</p>



<p>According to Euro-Med Monitor, those in the Gaza Strip have access to just <a href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6096/Lack-of-access-to-clean-drinking-water-is-a-death-sentence-for-the-people-of-Gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1.5 liters of water per person per day</a> for all needs, including drinking, cooking, and personal hygiene. The established international emergency water threshold <a href="https://emergency.unhcr.org/emergency-assistance/water-and-hygiene/wash-emergencies" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">is 15 liters per person per day</a>—ten times what Gazans have now. At least 20 people have already <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/3/6/israels-war-on-gaza-live-un-food-convoy-blocked-from-north-gaza-by-israel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">died of dehydration and malnutrition</a>, a number that will continue to rise as <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/intensifying-conflict-malnutrition-and-disease-gaza-strip-creates-deadly-cycle" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">diarrheal disease spreads</a> due to lack of clean water, leaving many unable to retain what few calories they ingest.</p>



<p>While the water crisis in Gaza is now catastrophic, the Palestinian struggle to access water long predates the current onslaught and is an issue in the West Bank, too. Before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had access to just 80 liters of water per person per day, while the World Health Organization estimates that individuals need as much <a href="https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/water" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">as 100 liters per day</a> to meet basic needs.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Despite significant investment in water and wastewater infrastructure in Palestine from <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/02/10/world-bank-and-partners-invest-us117-million-in-water-for-palestinians-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">institutions like the World Bank</a> <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/west-bank-and-gaza/water-and-sanitation" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">and the United States Agency for International Development </a>(USAID), <a href="https://ngwa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-6584.2008.00487.x" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Palestinian per capita water consumption</a> continues to fall.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The root cause of Palestine’s water crisis is not a lack of investment but the political reality that Israel, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/27/how-does-international-humanitarian-law-apply-israel-and-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">as an occupying power</a>, manages water in a way that denies Palestinians fair access. <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-israel-weaponises-water-gaza-strip">Experts</a> <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-israel-weaponises-water-gaza-strip" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">and rights groups</a> call this “water apartheid.” They say that recent Israeli tactics in Gaza, such as <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/16/israeli-authorities-cutting-water-leading-public-health-crisis-gaza#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20month,health%20experts%20of%20an%20imminent" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cutting off water to the enclave</a>, are just the latest examples of <a href="https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45719" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">its weaponization of the vital resource.</a></p>



<p>“Water apartheid describes a form of segregation that results in unequal access to water, where policies and practices ensure that water resources are disproportionately allocated to privileged groups while marginalized communities face scarcity and denial of access,” explains Saker El Nour, a sociologist and co-founder of <a href="https://twitter.com/WJ4Gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Water Justice for Gaza</a>, a collective of researchers and activists that publishes a newsletter on water in Palestine.</p>



<p>While the specifics of these unfair water policies and practices look different from Gaza to the West Bank, the overall water crisis is by design. “Water is weaponized as a tool of occupation and control,” says El Nour.</p>



<p>In Gaza, as early as 2017, UNICEF estimated that <a href="https://www.unicef.org/sop/what-we-do/wash-water-sanitation-and-hygiene" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">96% of the water</a> from the enclave’s sole aquifer was unfit for consumption due to untreated wastewater and seawater pollution. Still, before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, the aquifer <a href="https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&amp;ItemID=4634" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">provided over 80% </a>of Gaza’s water, with three desalination stations and three pipes from Israeli company Mekorot providing the remainder.&nbsp;</p>



<p>One of the largest contributors to the aquifer’s degradation is overuse. The aquifer is not overused because Gazan families consume too much water. It is because the aquifer is not able to sustain the territory’s population, which has swelled through <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136662" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">successive waves</a> <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/6/4/the-naksa-how-israel-occupied-the-whole-of-palestine-in-1967">of forced displacement</a> to make way for Zionist settlement. Today, <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/gaza-strip" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">about 1.7 million</a> of those living in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes elsewhere in Palestine.&nbsp;</p>



<p>While there were three operational desalination plants in Gaza before the current onslaught, these only <a href="https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&amp;ItemID=4634" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">provided about 5% </a>of the enclave’s water supply, and <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/timeline-humanitarian-impact-gaza-blockade" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli restrictions on supply imports</a> <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-01-09/ty-article/.premium/israel-holds-up-vital-spare-parts-for-gazas-water-and-sewage-systems/0000017f-e7eb-d97e-a37f-f7efd5c50000">made it difficult to maintain them</a>. Those same restrictions have made it almost impossible for Gaza to scale up its wastewater infrastructure to prevent untreated waste from polluting the aquifer.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Meanwhile, in the West Bank, an agreement made in the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/13/what-were-oslo-accords-israel-palestinians" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Oslo Accords</a> <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/oslo-accords-palestine-israel-entrenched-control-water">giving Israel control over all water resources</a> persists, although it was only <a href="https://www.btselem.org/water" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">designed as a five-year transitional arrangement</a>. “The agreement ended up being just a way to police water and Palestinian water professionals and water institutes,” says Mariam Zaqout, a water and economics researcher at University College London.</p>



<p>Wielding this power, Israel uses the majority of the water pumped from the West Bank’s main groundwater basin and restricts <a href="https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/troubled-waters-palestinians-denied-fair-access-to-water/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Palestinian access to only about 20%</a>. Israel uses all the water from the Jordan River, leaving none for Palestinian communities. It has also created a system of forced dependency where West Bank cities are left with no choice but to import water from Israel via its national network, which has been built out into the West Bank to support illegal settlements. Today, those Israeli settlers <a href="https://www.btselem.org/video/202305_parched" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">use three times as much water per day</a> as West Bank Palestinians.&nbsp;</p>



<p>“There has been a lot of infrastructure building by Israel mainly to support settlements in the West Bank, all connected to Israel’s national water network,” explains Jan Selby, a professor of International Politics and Climate Change at the University of Leeds. “But Palestinian communities have been connected to it at the same time, partly to make them dependent.”</p>



<p>While Ramallah, a city in the central West Bank tucked into the Khalil Mountains, gets more annual rainfall than even famously gray London, it imports its water from Israel because restrictions on developing its own infrastructure, drilling wells, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">and even collecting rainwater</a> force it to do so.&nbsp;</p>



<p>“There is a segregationist thing of investing in water infrastructure for the settler population, allowing them to dig deeper wells to pull out more water, and constraining the Palestinian population, not letting them invest in improvements in their water infrastructure,” explains Michael Mason, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.</p>



<p>Solutions to these issues will include new infrastructure and water management agreements, but those must be developed within a new political reality. Even in Gaza now, where UNICEF estimates <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-gazas-widening-humanitarian-crisis-water-access-becomes-dire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more than half of the water supply infrastructure</a> requires repair, Zaqout says she believes solutions must go far beyond the standard post-conflict paradigm of rebuilding and rehabilitating.&nbsp;</p>



<p>“Development aid is just a band-aid put on to make things look good, but it does not necessarily offer a sustainable solution,” she says. “The United Nations or USAID, for example, could spend a hundred million pounds to build a big water treatment plant, but then it gets bombed and that’s it—nothing is protected.”</p>



<p>What is needed instead, Zaqout says, is an end to Israel’s control over Palestinian resources and its attacks on infrastructure and autonomy for Palestinian decision-makers to “think about their water needs, design their own infrastructure, and manage and decide on how they want to allocate funds.”</p>



<p>Mason says that the political pressure needed to push governments like those of the United States and the United Kingdom toward withholding support for Israel’s occupation could come from international courts and rights groups. Many of these are already spotlighting Israel’s weaponization of water.&nbsp;</p>



<p>When South Africa gave opening arguments in its case at the International Court of Justice in January, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, it argued that genocidal acts included the deprivation of access to adequate food and water and the deprivation of access to adequate sanitation. United Nations agencies have also been highlighting the acute water crisis in Gaza, with Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, arguing that “<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/israel-must-stop-using-water-weapon-war-un-expert" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Every hour that passes with Israel</a> preventing the provision of safe drinking water [is a] brazen breach of international law.”</p>



<p>At the grassroots level, Water Justice for Gaza is mobilizing popular support to help end water apartheid in Palestine and make connections to other struggles for water justice. Last December, to coincide with <a href="https://www.cop28.com/en/news/2023/12/COP28-Food-griculture-and-Water-Day" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Food, Agriculture, and Water Day at COP28</a>, it held a “Day of Movement to End Water Apartheid.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTvFtsuuob4&amp;ab_channel=TRTWorld" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Organizers at the conference in Dubai</a> spoke and distributed information about Palestine’s water crisis, and online participants, including water protectors, farmworkers, researchers, and activists from around the world, shared their stories and support for the cause.</p>



<p>El Nour says the response “indicat[ed] a broad recognition of the interconnectedness of justice movements worldwide and the global resonance of the water crisis in Palestine.”</p>



<p>Bringing about an end to this crisis in Palestine is ever more urgent as insufficient access to clean water threatens Palestinians nationwide and Gazans face an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Whether in the courtroom, online, <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/01/23/global-protest-free-palestine-israel-ceasefire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">or out on the streets</a>, many in the global Palestinian rights movement are speaking out about water apartheid as part of their demands for meaningful change.</p>



<p>“The water issues are a reflection of those broader issues and the other way around,” says Selby. “If you resolve or address or manage to negotiate some kind of resolution or settlement to the core political issues of the conflict, the water issues are relatively easy to address.”</p>

<p>This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a> at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/04/08/water-israel-gaza-west-bank">https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/04/08/water-israel-gaza-west-bank</a>.</p><link href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2024/04/08/water-israel-gaza-west-bank" rel="canonical"/><p>Yes! Magazine is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of ... . Learn more at <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org">Yes! Magazine</a></p><img id="republication-tracker-tool-source" src="https://www.yesmagazine.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=118072&ga4=G-74QJNNY44Z" style="width:1px;height:1px;">

Ending Water Apartheid in Palestine

As the Israeli assault on Gaza enters its sixth month, the enclave’s population of about 2 million is struggling to survive with little access to life’s most basic necessity: water.

According to Euro-Med Monitor, those in the Gaza Strip have access to just 1.5 liters of water per person per day for all needs, including drinking, cooking, and personal hygiene. The established international emergency water threshold is 15 liters per person per day—ten times what Gazans have now. At least 20 people have already died of dehydration and malnutrition, a number that will continue to rise as diarrheal disease spreads due to lack of clean water, leaving many unable to retain what few calories they ingest.

While the water crisis in Gaza is now catastrophic, the Palestinian struggle to access water long predates the current onslaught and is an issue in the West Bank, too. Before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had access to just 80 liters of water per person per day, while the World Health Organization estimates that individuals need as much as 100 liters per day to meet basic needs.

Despite significant investment in water and wastewater infrastructure in Palestine from institutions like the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Palestinian per capita water consumption continues to fall.

The root cause of Palestine’s water crisis is not a lack of investment but the political reality that Israel, as an occupying power, manages water in a way that denies Palestinians fair access. Experts and rights groups call this “water apartheid.” They say that recent Israeli tactics in Gaza, such as cutting off water to the enclave, are just the latest examples of its weaponization of the vital resource.

“Water apartheid describes a form of segregation that results in unequal access to water, where policies and practices ensure that water resources are disproportionately allocated to privileged groups while marginalized communities face scarcity and denial of access,” explains Saker El Nour, a sociologist and co-founder of Water Justice for Gaza, a collective of researchers and activists that publishes a newsletter on water in Palestine.

While the specifics of these unfair water policies and practices look different from Gaza to the West Bank, the overall water crisis is by design. “Water is weaponized as a tool of occupation and control,” says El Nour.

In Gaza, as early as 2017, UNICEF estimated that 96% of the water from the enclave’s sole aquifer was unfit for consumption due to untreated wastewater and seawater pollution. Still, before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, the aquifer provided over 80% of Gaza’s water, with three desalination stations and three pipes from Israeli company Mekorot providing the remainder.

One of the largest contributors to the aquifer’s degradation is overuse. The aquifer is not overused because Gazan families consume too much water. It is because the aquifer is not able to sustain the territory’s population, which has swelled through successive waves of forced displacement to make way for Zionist settlement. Today, about 1.7 million of those living in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes elsewhere in Palestine.

While there were three operational desalination plants in Gaza before the current onslaught, these only provided about 5% of the enclave’s water supply, and Israeli restrictions on supply imports made it difficult to maintain them. Those same restrictions have made it almost impossible for Gaza to scale up its wastewater infrastructure to prevent untreated waste from polluting the aquifer.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, an agreement made in the Oslo Accords giving Israel control over all water resources persists, although it was only designed as a five-year transitional arrangement. “The agreement ended up being just a way to police water and Palestinian water professionals and water institutes,” says Mariam Zaqout, a water and economics researcher at University College London.

Wielding this power, Israel uses the majority of the water pumped from the West Bank’s main groundwater basin and restricts Palestinian access to only about 20%. Israel uses all the water from the Jordan River, leaving none for Palestinian communities. It has also created a system of forced dependency where West Bank cities are left with no choice but to import water from Israel via its national network, which has been built out into the West Bank to support illegal settlements. Today, those Israeli settlers use three times as much water per day as West Bank Palestinians.

“There has been a lot of infrastructure building by Israel mainly to support settlements in the West Bank, all connected to Israel’s national water network,” explains Jan Selby, a professor of International Politics and Climate Change at the University of Leeds. “But Palestinian communities have been connected to it at the same time, partly to make them dependent.”

While Ramallah, a city in the central West Bank tucked into the Khalil Mountains, gets more annual rainfall than even famously gray London, it imports its water from Israel because restrictions on developing its own infrastructure, drilling wells, and even collecting rainwater force it to do so.

“There is a segregationist thing of investing in water infrastructure for the settler population, allowing them to dig deeper wells to pull out more water, and constraining the Palestinian population, not letting them invest in improvements in their water infrastructure,” explains Michael Mason, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.

Solutions to these issues will include new infrastructure and water management agreements, but those must be developed within a new political reality. Even in Gaza now, where UNICEF estimates more than half of the water supply infrastructure requires repair, Zaqout says she believes solutions must go far beyond the standard post-conflict paradigm of rebuilding and rehabilitating.

“Development aid is just a band-aid put on to make things look good, but it does not necessarily offer a sustainable solution,” she says. “The United Nations or USAID, for example, could spend a hundred million pounds to build a big water treatment plant, but then it gets bombed and that’s it—nothing is protected.”

What is needed instead, Zaqout says, is an end to Israel’s control over Palestinian resources and its attacks on infrastructure and autonomy for Palestinian decision-makers to “think about their water needs, design their own infrastructure, and manage and decide on how they want to allocate funds.”

Mason says that the political pressure needed to push governments like those of the United States and the United Kingdom toward withholding support for Israel’s occupation could come from international courts and rights groups. Many of these are already spotlighting Israel’s weaponization of water.

When South Africa gave opening arguments in its case at the International Court of Justice in January, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, it argued that genocidal acts included the deprivation of access to adequate food and water and the deprivation of access to adequate sanitation. United Nations agencies have also been highlighting the acute water crisis in Gaza, with Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, arguing that “Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water [is a] brazen breach of international law.”

At the grassroots level, Water Justice for Gaza is mobilizing popular support to help end water apartheid in Palestine and make connections to other struggles for water justice. Last December, to coincide with Food, Agriculture, and Water Day at COP28, it held a “Day of Movement to End Water Apartheid.” Organizers at the conference in Dubai spoke and distributed information about Palestine’s water crisis, and online participants, including water protectors, farmworkers, researchers, and activists from around the world, shared their stories and support for the cause.

El Nour says the response “indicat[ed] a broad recognition of the interconnectedness of justice movements worldwide and the global resonance of the water crisis in Palestine.”

Bringing about an end to this crisis in Palestine is ever more urgent as insufficient access to clean water threatens Palestinians nationwide and Gazans face an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Whether in the courtroom, online, or out on the streets, many in the global Palestinian rights movement are speaking out about water apartheid as part of their demands for meaningful change.

“The water issues are a reflection of those broader issues and the other way around,” says Selby. “If you resolve or address or manage to negotiate some kind of resolution or settlement to the core political issues of the conflict, the water issues are relatively easy to address.”

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