Just eighteen months after the 1967 invasion, Israel handed over all the water resources of the region and Palestine to the Israeli army, declaring that all water resources were national and belonged to Israel and that Palestinians could not exploit them without permission. Then, whenever Palestinians went for permission, it most often did not allow them to exploit or dig wells or dig shallow and dry wells. And only after that, in 1982, the Israeli government transferred all the water in the region to the Israeli company Mekorot, of course under the laws and control of the Israeli government. In total, in the entire region, Israelis have access to 89.5% and Palestinians to 10.5% of the available groundwater, with an almost equal population. The groundwater has a total of eight basins, four in Israel and four in the occupied territories. The Palestinians do not have access to the Jordan River or any other river of surface water.
Israel annually extracts 90% of the “mountain” aquifer water for its own citizens, while the Palestinians can only have 10%. It diverts the only surface water source in the region, the Jordan River, which flows through the West Bank, and does not allow the Palestinians to use it. The Jordan River flows into two different places along this border: the northern part, which produces the largest source of fresh water, flows into the Sea of Galilee, which is itself fresh water, and the lower part, which flows into the very salty Dead Sea. Israel pumps a large amount of water from the Jordan River for itself and Jordan and sends the rest through canals to its national waterways before reaching the West Bank (see the attached map, marked in red). The Jordan River is generally exploited by Syria, Israel, and Jordan, and does not reach the Palestinians. Israel also diverts the Torza River, or Wadi al-Fara’a, in the West Bank, which is fed by seasonal rainfall, and sends it to the Torza reservoirs for Israeli farmers to use for their crops. In September 2019, Netanyahu also promised to occupy and annex the “Fertile Jordan Valley” to Israel during his election campaign.
Between 2009 and 2019, the Israelis destroyed or reduced 547 Palestinian water structures. Ultimately, Palestinians are forced to buy water from the Mekoro-Rot company. In 2009, the World Bank reported that each Israeli uses four times as much water as a Palestinian living in the same area. In 2017, Amnesty International produced a report showing how Palestinian farmers have been forced to grow limited crops that use less water. Israel’s history since 1967 shows a steady advance and occupation of Palestinian land and water resources.
Israel itself sends water from the north of its occupied territories to the south, but Palestinians are not allowed to transfer water from the West Bank to Gaza. Before October 7, 2023, about 90 percent of Gaza’s water came from the coastal aquifer, which flows from the Mediterranean to Gaza and then to Israel. Israel’s excessive withdrawal of these aquifers caused saltwater to infiltrate the water, making it tasteless and brackish. It also became unfit for human consumption because of the leaching of sewage and chemicals into the water. The remaining 10 percent was supplied through three large pipes from Israel at high tariffs and a small desalination plant, which were cut off after the war. In parts of Gaza where there was no piped water, residents, who made up about two-thirds of the population, bought their water from Israeli tankers carrying poor quality water at a high price of five to six times the price of piped water, between US$4 and US$10 per cubic meter. (Some families paid between 40% and 50% of their income for water.) Israel even pumps water from springs into Jewish settlements, and Palestinian villages are facing dry springs (Amnesty International 2017 report).
Before October 7, 26% of illnesses in Gaza were water-borne. These included diarrhea, viral hypoxia, kidney and liver disease, blue baby syndrome (a condition in which the blood does not carry oxygen, with rapid, shallow breathing and bluish skin that can lead to death), and severe anemia, as well as intellectual disabilities. The United Nations has found more than 96% of Gaza’s water unfit for human consumption. Gaza’s water has an average of more than 100 colonies of bacteria per square inch. In the United States and most developed countries, drinking water, whether from municipal facilities or wells, must be absolutely free of these bacteria. For example, in the United States, if they find a slight drop in pressure or any minor problem in the water distribution pipes, the government immediately recommends that all consumers boil their water.
Gaza’s water was 85% unsafe in 1998, and by 2018, this percentage had risen to 97%. As a collective punishment, on October 9, 2023, the Israeli government ordered the closure of all vital resources, including water, food, medicine, and fuel, to the people of Gaza, and then, as in previous wars, including the 2014 war, it began bombing Gaza’s vital facilities, including water supplies, water and sewage treatment plants, and power generation facilities. Very quickly, the people of Gaza lost 95% of their water supplies, and after the destruction of the sewage treatment plants, sewage flowed into the streets. According to a United Nations report, the people of Gaza now live on a daily ration of three liters of water, which is far below the internationally established emergency ration of fifteen liters per day. According to a 2009 World Bank report, each Israeli used an average of 300 liters of water per day (Israelis have beautiful gardens and swimming pools). Experts predict an outbreak of cholera and other diseases caused by contaminated water and dehydration in Gaza, where there are now no clinics reporting such illnesses.
According to Amnesty International’s 2017 report, the average Palestinian consumed 73 liters of water per day, and in some areas of the West Bank, even 20 liters per day, compared to the Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ estimate of 100 liters per person per day. In the same area, the average Israeli consumed 300 liters per day. Amnesty International reports photos of lush Israeli gardens and swimming pools next to Palestinians deprived of adequate water.
On the other hand, tens of millions of gallons of sewage are now dumped into the Mediterranean Sea every day, from which some of the drinking water is taken, and there are no more clinics in Gaza to treat diseases caused by this pollution. For example, in 2016 and 2017, after the 2015 wars in the crises in Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Bahrain and the region, after heavy rains, sewage flowed into the streets and cholera broke out. Two million people were infected with cholera and 3,500 people died. In total, according to UNICEF, in wars, children under five die twenty times more often from diarrhea than from direct attacks by war.
Now, the American national television, Public Television, has produced a report on the displaced people of Gaza in their tents, which shows that the tents are full of scorpions, cockroaches, insects, mosquitoes, flies, and rats, and the stench of sewage makes breathing unbearable. One of the reasons for this is the destruction of all water purification systems and the lack of fuel for the few remaining water purification pumps. Israel is absolutely preventing fuel from reaching Gaza.
Israeli industrial establishments in the occupied Palestinian territories are more than just family settlers. These establishments forcibly seize Palestinian natural resources, including stone quarries in the West Bank, which the so-called Palestinian Authority apparently administers, in violation of the Hague Convention. In 2016, Human Rights Watch prepared a detailed report on this matter. It should be noted that Israel recently decided to build Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights, which it illegally occupied from Syria, and the United Nations has declared the occupation of these heights illegal and condemned this decision. Israel continuously first seizes Palestinian lands and then begins to build settlements, and then immediately, in addition to building houses, it builds various urban service centers, and then a flood of various establishments flows into the new village. Interestingly, Israel is opening more than usual archaeological sites, which we have heard of sometimes making discoveries about their ancestors going back thousands of years and that the land belongs to the Jews. In the occupied territories, Palestinians are under Israeli military rule and there is complete Israeli surveillance throughout the territory.
The Israeli authorities also restrict Palestinians’ access to water by denying or restricting their access to large parts of the West Bank. Many parts of the West Bank have been declared “closed military areas”, which Palestinians may not enter, because they are close to Israeli settlements, close to roads used by Israeli settlers, used for Israeli military training or protected nature reserves.
Israeli settlers living alongside Palestinians in the West Bank – in some cases just a few hundred meters away – face no such restrictions and water shortages and can enjoy and capitalize on well-irrigated farmlands and swimming pools.
In Gaza, some 90-95 per cent of the water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza, and Gaza’s only freshwater resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population and is being increasingly depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration.
The resulting disparity in access to water between Israelis and Palestinians is truly staggering. Water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, an average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.
50 years on, it is time for the Israeli authorities to put an end to policies and practices which discriminate against Palestinians in the OPT and to address their desperate need for water security. The Israeli authorities must lift the restrictions currently in place which deny millions of Palestinians access to sufficient water to meet their personal and domestic needs as well as to enjoy their rights to water, food, health, work and an adequate standard of living.
Devastating toll on communities in the Jordan valley
In September 2017 Amnesty International researchers met with residents of the Jordan Valley and witnessed first-hand the catastrophic impact the water restrictions have had on people’s daily lives.
Ihab Saleh, a squash and cucumber farmer living in Ein al-Beida, a Palestinian village of about 1,600 people located in the northern part of the West Bank, is one of hundreds of thousands of people whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by Israeli water restrictions. Over the past 25 years he has seen the local spring gradually dry up after the Israeli company Mekorot drilled two wells near the neighbouring Palestinian community of Bardala, to serve Mehola, an Israeli settlement. The amount of water the Israeli authorities allocate to the village has been decreasing over the years, he says, and has been fully cut off on numerous occasions. Despite an agreement to compensate the Palestinian villages of Bardala and Ein al-Beida, since the mid-1970s, Israel has significantly reduced the amount of water available to both communities.
In addition to the farming villages, many Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley face severe restrictions as a consequence of Israel’s control of Palestinian natural water resources. Often the land they live on is designated by Israel as a “closed military area”. Not only is their access to water limited, they also live under the constant threat of forced evictions through demolition orders on their homes and properties.
Two families living beside highway 90 near the village of Ein Al-Beida have had their houses and property destroyed twice in the last two years. Most recently, in December 2016, the Israeli army destroyed two home structures and all of the water tanks belonging to the families.
In al-Auja, a village of about 5,200 people, 10 kilometres north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, the situation is much the same. In 1972, Mekorot sunk a well and established a pumping station, close to the Wadi Auja spring. According to residents, the spring used to provide a plentiful supply of water to the village and surrounding agricultural land via a series of irrigation channels.
Even the Palestinian Authority does not realize that this used to be a centre for agriculture… People are left with no options. In 1967, when they [the Israeli authorities] started taking the water it was like a sickness in a body… slowly the land dried up.
Issa Nijoum speaking to Amnesty International, Al-Auja.
Due to water shortages, farmers in Al-Auja were forced to diversify from their traditional livelihoods and now grow crops that are less water-intensive and also less profitable. While in the past they grew mainly citrus fruit and were capable of exporting them, they rely now on less water intensive vegetable crops such as zucchini, cucumber and squash, which can sustain a cultivation period of three to four months through the winter season. Many residents of Al-Auja have also been forced to find work in farms located in three neighbouring Israeli settlements, which have unrestricted access to water.
Israeli settlements’ access to water
Swimming Pool in Ma’ale Adumim. With water supply roughly four times greater than that provided to Palestinian communities, Israeli settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim stand in stark contrast to their Palestinian neighbours.
Lush vegetation in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. With a population of 37,670, the settlement is one of the largest in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Grape harvest in the Israeli settlement of Psagot, July 2017. The winery at Psagot was founded in 2003 and according to its official website, produces around 350,000 bottles of wine a year, 70 percent of which is exported internationally. Grapes are high value, water intensive crops.
An Israeli settlement date farm close to the village of Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, 21 September 2017. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods produced in Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land are exported internationally each year, despite the fact that the vast majority of states have officially condemned the settlements as illegal under international law.
A water filling point on the outskirts of the village of Al-Auja in the Jordan Valley. For Palestinians with no access to running water the situation is dire. To meet their basic needs, they have no choice but to purchase additional water from tankers, usually twice a day. The water is often of dubious quality and is more expensive than that supplied through the water network.
Qais Nasaran a store owner from Al-Jiftlik, a village with an estimated population of approximately 4,700, located in the northern Jordan Valley, used to farm a small plot of land. After his well dried up, he has been forced to find a new way to make a living. He now runs a grocery store.
The store is located in an old pump house for a well which was sunk in 1966 with permission from the Jordanian authorities who controlled the West Bank at the time. A year later, after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, the Israeli authorities stopped Qais Nasaran’s family from using it. There was water in the well until 2014 when it finally dried up. Qais explained how, each year, when the well was full, the Israeli military would check to see no one was using it.
Qais still owns a cistern on his land but cannot always afford to fill it as it costs around 8,000 NIS (approximately 2,278 USD). He buys his water from a landowner in the Jordan Valley.
For Mustafa Al-Farawi, a date farmer from Al-Jiftlik, the situation is similar. The amount of water available from the well on his land has been decreasing steadily over the years.
He explains that, in the 1980’s, the well would provide enough water to irrigate an area of 1,000 acres, and provide water for the animals, as well as supporting the family. Now the majority of water used for his date farm has to be bought and transported with a water tank from a spring 7km away, which is the only spring that can still be accessed by Palestinians.
We have not enough water and no control of it. The Israeli authorities’ tactic is to slowly decrease the water, so we have to leave the land.
Mustafa Al-Farawi, Al-Jiftlik
In recent years, Mustafa wanted to sink a new well at a different location that would guarantee more water. He says that an engineer came to check and there was water closer to ground level on another part of the farm’s land. He applied for drilling rights, but the Israeli authorities denied the application. Eventually he decided to sink the well anyway without permission, but the Israeli army came and prevented him from doing so. He was told that sinking the well was against Israeli military orders and the construction was halted.
The village of Furush Beit Dajan, in the northern West Bank with a population of about 930, used to be a producer of citrus fruit. From the mid 1990’s, farmers have had to diversify their crops due to insufficient water supplies.
The villagers say that they used to have an abundance of water but in recent years the wells have been supplying less and less. Residents of the village mentioned that the aquifer is being exhausted by Israeli wells used to supply the neighbouring Israeli settlements of Hamra and Mehora. According to Azim Mifleh, a farmer from the village, Israeli wells started pumping in the vicinity of the village in the 1970’s and slowly the local wells lost their efficiency. Since the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1995, Israel has extracted far in excess of the agreed quantity of water from the Eastern Aquifer.
Azim Mifleh, a farmer and coordinator for the Agricultural Development Association (PARC) from Furush Bei Dajan, says he used to have 800 trees on his land; mostly lemon and grapefruit. Now he only has two trees left next to the house.
Azim Mifleh had to diversify and grow crops in greenhouses. Most of the crops he now grows, including cucumbers, tomatoes and squash, can only be cultivated in the winter and spring seasons.
The land is occupied and the [Israeli] occupiers should be looking after the people…Israel should be doing what they are supposed to; they have to pay the price for occupying, and act in the best interest of the occupied people.
Azim Mifleh, Furush Beit Dajan
There are five water wells in the vicinity of Furush Beit Dajan village- all are privately owned by Palestinians. According to residents from the village, they have suffered drastic decreases in their output of water due to Israeli wells being sunk in the area to supply the settlement of Hamra, which farms an extensive area of land. The settlement of Hamra has a 100 acre date farm and also harvests water-intensive crops such as bananas and citrus fruits.
Palestinian tourists from Nablus pray in an abandoned lido near the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley. Since 1967, the Israeli authorities have denied Palestinians access to the Jordan River has been restricted entirely along its whole course through the West bank. Water levels in the Dead Sea have fallen dramatically over the past 50 years due to diversion of the river Jordan up stream by Israel as well as Jordan and Syria. The Dead Sea now lies around half a kilometre away from the lido when once it surrounded it.
The Siege of Gaza’s Water
Commentary by Natasha Hall, Anita Kirschenbaum, and David Michel
Published January 12, 2024
On October 9, in response to the October 7 assault by Hamas militants, Israel’s defense minister ordered a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, including the halting of electricity, food, water, and fuel sent to Gaza from Israel. Clean water is unavailable for most living in Gaza, and Israeli airstrikes are destroying water infrastructure and wells—in potential violation of international humanitarian law—in addition to taking thousands of lives and displacing almost two million Gazans. Even more lives are at risk as the threat of disease increases. Improving water access in Gaza is essential to preventing further loss of life and livelihoods and to rebuilding a secure and sustainable future when the present conflict ceases.
A Water Crisis Worsened by War
Gazans struggled to access adequate safe water even before the current crisis. About 90 percent of Gaza’s water supply comes from the Coastal Aquifer Basin, which runs along the eastern Mediterranean coast from Egypt through Gaza and into Israel. However, the water is brackish and contaminated due to seawater intrusion, overextraction, and sewage and chemical infiltration. Consequently, Gazans rely on small-scale desalination units and unregulated private water tankers, which can be costly and pose additional health risks. The remaining 10 percent of water not pumped from the Coastal Aquifer comes primarily from three Israeli pipelines and from small-scale seawater desalination plants.
As a result of Israel’s siege, Gazans’ access to water from all sources, including desalination and external Israeli sources, quickly dropped by 95 percent after October 9. The United Nations estimates that the average Gazan is living on only 3 liters of water per day for all needs—well below the United Nation’s emergency standard of 15 liters. Without energy, all five of Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants and most of its 65 sewage pumping stations were forced to shut down by mid-November. Some small desalination plants in southern Gaza may be operating at a much reduced capacity, but plants in northern Gaza are not functional. As many as 70 percent of Gazans now resort to drinking salty and contaminated water straight from wells.
The ongoing violence after October 7 further exacerbates the crisis. The Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem estimated that of 581 key water and sanitation facilities, 37 were destroyed and 226 had suspected damage by November 14. Daily bombardments restrict civilians’ ability to collect water, render farming impossible, endanger staff operating water plants, and limit circulation of water tankers.
Airstrikes and Israeli evacuation orders have driven much of the population from their homes seeking safety. Some 1.9 million Gazans—nearly 93 percent of Gaza’s population—have been displaced since Israel’s invasion. The staggering number of internally displaced people (IDPs) increases water stress in Southern Gaza, with water systems in the south ill-equipped to meet the rising demand. Constantly moving populations complicate delivery of water supplies, and the crowding in southern Gaza has led to the spread of waterborne illness and disease stemming from lack of hygiene. By November 9, humanitarian organizations warned that outbreaks of cholera and typhoid were imminent.
Israel’s control over Gaza’s borders has inhibited aid agencies’ ability to fill the gaps. When aid trucks were finally allowed to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing on October 21, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) delivered over 44,000 bottles of drinking water as part of the 20-truck convoy—only one day’s supply of water for 22,000. The November 24 truce temporarily allowed for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and UNICEF to supply fuel to Gaza’s main water utility, which in turn distributed it to water and sanitation facilities in the south, but aid agencies remained unable to improve access to water in the north.
The Resulting Public Health Disaster
A long-expected health crisis has now surged. Inadequate water quality and quantity can lead to decreased water consumption and associated unsafe hygiene practices related to contaminated food, hands, and utensils. By November 29, the World Health Organization reported more than 75,000 documented cases of diarrhea since mid-October with children under age five accounting for around half the cases. By comparison, in 2021 and 2022, Gaza averaged 2,000 diarrhea cases a month among young children. Without access to clean water, doctors are resorting to chemical disinfectants to sterilize instruments. Coupled with the unavailability of iodine to clean wounds, hospitals struggle to provide sufficient care. Medical experts also fear the collapse of water and wastewater treatment services, together with overcrowding in hospitals, makeshift camps, and shelters, could fuel the spread of infections resistant to antimicrobial treatment.
The breakdown of Gaza’s water systems risks prolonging a deepening social and public health disaster even after the conflict ends. Before October 7, 26 percent of diseases observed in Gaza were water-related, stemming from reliance on the contaminated and brackish Coastal Aquifer Basin in conjunction with inadequate and under-resourced water services. Now, damage to sanitation infrastructure is causing untreated wastewater and sewage to overflow into the streets and the sea. Over time, wastes can leach into the groundwater supplies, polluting wells and nearby agricultural areas. Common diseases caused by contaminated water include diarrhea, viral hepatitis, liver and kidney diseases, methemoglobinemia (blue baby syndrome), and anemia. The wars in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Iraq For example, the conflict in Yemen that began in 2015 damaged or destroyed critical water infrastructure. In 2016 and 2017, two devastating cholera outbreaks flared after heavy rainfalls overwhelmed compromised sewage and stormwater systems, resulting in over two million recorded cases and 3,500 related deaths. In some cases, damage to water infrastructure in conflict zones can pose greater health risks than the violence itself. UNICEF reports that during protracted conflicts, children under five are over 20 times more likely to die from diarrheal diseases linked to unsafe water and sanitation than from violence.
These health concerns do not just endanger Gaza but can travel across borders through sewage and water systems. Without functioning treatment plants in Gaza, tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage are discharged daily into the Mediterranean Sea, renewing pollution threats to the intake of desalination plants in Israel. And while prior to the current siege Gaza’s health clinics were able to detect waterborne diseases, Gaza’s overwhelmed health practitioners have limited capacity for disease containment. Were an epidemic to arise, disruption and mass displacement could spread diseases to neighboring countries, as it did in 2015, when a cholera outbreak exacerbated by instability in Iraq widened to Syria, Kuwait, and Bahrain.
Gaza’s Collapsing Water Systems and Infrastructure
Even more destructive than previous conflicts in Gaza, the current violence impairs an already brittle water sector. Years of clashes between Hamas and Israel have severely deteriorated Gaza’s water and sanitation services. The 2014 war alone caused $34 million in damage to these systems. During the May 2021 escalation, 290 water infrastructure “objects” were damaged, inflicting $10–15 million in damages. At the same time, the denial of humanitarian access and the blockade on Gaza significantly slowed repairs and restoration of water services, leaving them vulnerable to further degradation. Following the 2021 conflict, untreated sewage flowed into the streets, lakes, and sea from damaged wastewater infrastructure. With the destruction still incompletely repaired months later, severe storms in 2022 led to flash flooding worsened by damaged pipes and stormwater drains clogged with untreated waste.
Israel, worried that piping could be used to make weapons, has restricted the equipment needed to enhance Gaza’s water services. These restrictions, combined with frequent bouts of conflict and repeated destruction of critical infrastructure, have made donors wary of investing in Gaza’s water sector. By 2016, around 79 percent of the desalination plants were unlicensed, and 38 percent of the water they produced was contaminated. Such challenges forced the authorities into a reactive cycle of rebuilding damaged water infrastructure and abandoning more forward-looking plans for resilient systems, such as artificial aquifer recharge. Instead, donors and aid agencies have invested in decentralized wastewater and desalination plants, solar panels, and other dispersed facilities to mitigate the consequences of the blockade and recurrent violence.
However, according to a recent study, many of these installations have been destroyed. Humanitarian aid organizations reported to CSIS that NICEF and EU-funded desalination plant in northern Gaza that provided 10,000 cubic meters of drinkable water per day, which makes up 14 percent of Gaza’s potable water, has been damaged, as well as the beach well where the plant extracted water. The Gaza Central Wastewater Plant was also severely damaged. Opened in April 2021 with an additional solar panel field providing electricity, the facility treated the sewage of over half of Gaza’s population. The solar field, meant to increase the resilience of a blockaded Gaza, has been destroyed.
While the violence continues, many uncertainties will remain as to the conflict’s scope and long-term impact. Yet the damage to Gaza’s infrastructure will eventually need to be assessed in hopes of reconstruction and water systems will need to be restored, raising several important considerations.
Barriers to Reconstruction
Many challenges have hindered past post-conflict reconstruction efforts, including inadequate financing, import restrictions, lengthy approval processes, and difficulties ensuring that Hamas will not benefit from the aid provided. This has rendered previous recovery efforts far too slow and limited Gaza’s ability both to establish more resilient water systems and prevent the impending collapse of the Coastal Aquifer. Reconstruction efforts after Israel’s May 2021 offensive only began four months after the ceasefire, with rebuilding estimated to cost up to $485 million over the first two years. In comparison, UNICEF now calculates immediate costs of $53.4 million to meet urgent water and sanitation needs. The ultimate price of reconstruction will be colossal. One analysis estimates the cost of rebuilding decimated housing stocks alone at $3.5 billion.
Past reconstruction has primarily focused on the immediate requirements of the region, not long-term solutions. Given the persistent threat of conflict in the region, it is imperative to support resilient water systems and infrastructure that can meet the needs of civilians in times of crisis. This requires much faster and greater levels of funding, agreements enabling imports of critical supplies for essential infrastructure, and an increased focus on improving the delivery of safe water services to conflict-affected and displaced communities.
Protecting Water in Times of Conflict
The near complete blockade on water in Gaza is unprecedented. During times of conflict, international humanitarian law prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” such as water infrastructure and drinking water installations. International law also forbids depriving civilians of access to water and requires parties to conflict to allow safe passage for humanitarian relief. In Gaza, water infrastructure has been destroyed and the delivery of clean water and fuel to operate water treatment plants has also been impeded. The protection of water under international humanitarian law needs to be strengthened and upheld, and greater allowances made for the importation of critical supplies, in addition to the prioritization of long-term and resilient solutions.
Yet no solution can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation. All the region’s water and wastewater sources cross into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza alike. Both populations have an interest in tackling the crisis before it further undermines environmental and public health.
Palestinians are surrounded by sewage and garbage as summer Gaza heat continues
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — Children in sandals trudge through water contaminated with sewage and scale growing mounds of garbage in Gaza’s crowded tent camps for displaced families. People relieve themselves in burlap-covered pits, with nowhere nearby to wash their hands.
In the stifling summer heat, Palestinians say the odor and filth surrounding them is just another inescapable reality of war — like pangs of hunger or sounds of bombing.
The territory’s ability to dispose of garbage, treat sewage and deliver clean water has been virtually decimated by eight brutal months of war between Israel and Hamas. This has made grim living conditions worse and raised health risks for hundreds of thousands of people deprived of adequate shelter, food and medicine, aid groups say.
Hepatitis A cases are on the rise, and doctors fear that as warmer weather arrives, an outbreak of cholera is increasingly likely without dramatic changes to living conditions. The U.N., aid groups and local officials are scrambling to build latrines, repair water lines and bring desalination plants back online.
COGAT, the Israeli military body coordinating humanitarian aid efforts, said it’s engaging in efforts to improve the “hygiene situation.” But relief can’t come soon enough.
“Flies are in our food,” said Adel Dalloul, a 21-year-old whose family settled in a beach tent camp near the central Gaza city of Nuseirat. They wound up there after fleeing the southern city of Rafah, where they landed after leaving their northern Gaza home. “If you try to sleep, flies, insects and cockroaches are all over you.”
Over a million Palestinians had been living in hastily assembled tent camps in Rafah before Israel invaded in May. Since fleeing Rafah, many have taken shelter in even more crowded and unsanitary areas across southern and central Gaza that doctors describe as breeding grounds for disease — especially as temperatures regularly reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius).
“The stench in Gaza is enough to make you kind of immediately nauseous,” said Sam Rose, a director at the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
Conditions are exacting an emotional toll, too.
Anwar al-Hurkali, who lives with his family in a tent camp in the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah, said he can’t sleep for fear of scorpions and rodents. He doesn’t let his children leave their tent, he said, worrying they’ll get sick from pollution and mosquitoes.
“We cannot stand the smell of sewage,” he said. “It is killing us.”
Basic services breakdown
The U.N. estimates nearly 70% of Gaza’s water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged by Israel’s heavy bombardment. That includes all five of the territory’s wastewater treatment facilities, plus water desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs.
The employees who once managed municipal water and waste systems have been displaced, and some killed, officials say. This month, an Israeli strike in Gaza City killed five government employees repairing water wells, the city said.
Despite staffing shortages and damaged equipment, some desalination plants and sewage pumps are working, but they’re hampered by lack of fuel, aid workers say.
A U.N. assessment of two Deir al-Balah tent camps found in early June that people’s daily water consumption — including drinking, washing and cooking — averaged under 2 liters (about 67 ounces), far lower than the recommended 15 liters a day.
COGAT said it’s coordinating with the UN to repair sewage facilities and Gaza’s water system. Israel has opened three water lines “pumping millions of liters daily” into Gaza, it said.
But people often wait hours in line to collect potable water from delivery trucks, hauling back to their families whatever they can carry. The scarcity means families often wash with dirty water.
This week, Dalloul said, he lined up for water from a vendor. “We discovered that it was salty, polluted, and full of germs. We found worms in the water. I had been drinking from it,” he said. “I had gastrointestinal problems and diarrhea, and my stomach hurts until this moment.”
The World Health Organization declared an outbreak of Hepatitis A that, as of early June, had led to 81,700 reported cases of jaundice — a common symptom. The disease spreads primarily when uninfected people consume water or food contaminated with fecal matter.
Because wastewater treatment plants have shut down, untreated sewage is seeping into the ground or being pumped into the Mediterranean Sea, where tides move north toward Israel.
“If there are bad water conditions and polluted groundwater in Gaza, then this is an issue for Israel,” said Rose, of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. “It has in the past prompted actions by Israel to try and ameliorate the situation.”
COGAT said it’s working on “improving waste management processes” and examining proposals to establish new dumps and allow more garbage trucks into Gaza.
Where can garbage go?
Standing barefoot on a street in the Nuseirat refugee camp, 62-year-old Abu Shadi Afana compared the pile of garbage next to him to a “waterfall.” He said trucks continue to dump rubbish even though families live in tents nearby.
“There is no one to provide us with a tent, food, or drink, and on top of all of this, we live in garbage?” Afana said. Trash attracts bugs he’s never seen before in Gaza — small insects that stick to his skin. When he lies down, he said, he feels like they’re “eating his face.”
There are few other places for the garbage to go. When Israel’s military took control of a 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) buffer zone along its border with Gaza, two main landfills east of the cities of Khan Younis and Gaza City became off-limits.
In their absence, informal landfills have developed. Displaced Palestinians running out of areas to shelter say they’ve had little choice but to pitch tents near trash piles.
Satellite images from Planet Labs analyzed by The Associated Press show that an informal landfill in Khan Younis that sprung up after Oct. 7 appears to have doubled in length since January. Since the Rafah evacuation, a tent city has sprung up around the landfill, with Palestinians living between piles of garbage.
Cholera fears
Doctors in Gaza fear cholera may be on the horizon.
“The crowded conditions, the lack of water, the heat, the poor sanitation — these are the preconditions of cholera,” said Joanne Perry, a doctor working in southern Gaza with Doctors Without Borders.
Most patients have illnesses or infections caused by poor sanitation, she said. Scabies, gastrointestinal illnesses and rashes are common. Over 485,000 diarrhea cases have been reported since the war’s start, WHO says.
“When we go to the hospital to ask for medicine for diarrhea, they tell us it is not available, and I go to buy it outside the hospital,” al-Hurkali said. “But where do I get the money?”
COGAT says it’s coordinating delivery of vaccines and medical supplies and is in daily contact with Gaza health officials. COGAT is “unaware of any authentic, verified report of unusual illnesses other than viral illnesses,” it said.
With efforts stalled to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Dalloul says he’s lost hope that help is on the way.
“I am 21 years old. I am supposed to start my life,” he said. “Now I just live in front of the garbage.”
Frankel reported from Jerusalem. AP journalists Jack Jeffery in Ramallah, West Bank, and Michael Biesecker in Washington contributed to this report.
The fate of children, the elderly, and the disabled in the war against Gaza.
According to Human Rights Watch, the recent war against the Palestinian masses has left more than 41,000 dead (46,376 by the end of December 2024), more than 16,750 of whom are children, and thousands of thousands disabled, with a large proportion of them children and adolescents. As of last September, there are about 95,500 war-wounded people among the missing, more than 22,500 of whom are permanently disabled according to World Health Organization statistics. According to UNICEF, thousands of these injured are children who have lost one or two limbs. At the end of 2023, the UN Secretary-General published the annual “List of Shame,” an annual report on armed conflict and child casualties, and added Israel to the list for the first time. According to the report, Israel committed 5,698 horrific attacks in 2023 that killed and maimed children, including attacks on schools and hospitals. The last major medical center in Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital, was set on fire by Israel on Friday, December 27, 2024. Humanitarian organizations considered it a systematic destruction of hospitals and medical centers. Isn’t this genocide? The World Health Organization had recognized this hospital as the last major medical center in northern Gaza. Al Jazeera has prepared a shocking report on the evacuation and bombing of this hospital.
About 1.9 million people, or 90 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced or made homeless (according to Human Rights Watch). This homelessness has had a double and more frightening impact on disabled or handicapped children, the elderly, and other physically disabled Palestinians, which also include children, because this group of the population has difficulty leaving their residential area and moving around in general. Especially since such children need special equipment, food, and various daily medications. These problems have been exacerbated by Israel’s prevention of medical and food aid from reaching them to an unbelievable extent. According to the report, these children are more vulnerable to physical attacks by Israeli military forces, and when Israel gives the people of Gaza effective or ineffective warnings and short notice before bombing, the disabled are more affected than others. Handicapped children or those with serious illnesses have suffered a lot due to the long absence of the equipment and medications they need. Let’s not forget that all the surviving children in this war were also psychologically damaged, but disabled children have been more traumatized than other children for many reasons.
It should be noted that out of the 1.9 million war refugees, one million are children, of whom at least 19,000 have lost their parents and entire families and are completely homeless. The Israeli government is preventing the refugees from receiving food, medicine and other aid, and according to Human Rights Watch, 38 people have died of hunger as of September 2024, most of whom are children. In June, UNICEF reported that 3,000 Palestinian children are at risk of dying from hunger. Israel is using starvation and dehydration as a tactic of war, which is also prohibited under international law.
If the journalists had survived and reported the news from Gaza to the outside world, a great tragedy of humanity would have been recorded. One of the millions of events during the Nazi era and World War II is a true story that Albert Camus also told in his speech when he came to New York, the story of a mother who was forced by the Nazis to choose between her two sons to not be executed or to execute the other. Imagine the mental hell that mother would live in after making this decision for the rest of her life! Every moment, a new incident like this happens in Gaza that is often not reported anywhere, including the story of a pregnant mother named Reem Ajour who, on the orders of Israeli soldiers, left her wounded husband and four-year-old daughter at home and was expelled from her home with her son on the orders and threats of Israeli soldiers, after which their house was blown up.
It should not be forgotten that 2.1 million people in Gaza lived in the most densely populated part of the world in an area measuring 25 by 7.4 kilometers, an open prison closed to the world on all sides. Now Gaza is completely unlivable and there is a famine in northern Gaza, which Israel does not allow the UN to deliver food and other basic necessities. Of course, this displacement and expulsion of the people of Gaza and to the north, and then bombing even the north, is because Israel is trying to expel all the Palestinians living in Gaza from its territory if it can and supposedly send them to Egypt and other countries. Although Egypt has not accepted the migration of even a percentage of the people of Gaza due to its economic situation, it can be predicted that Egypt will be forced to do this by taking a budget and perhaps with a threat in the future. “According to the testimony of history, every five- or six-years Israel launches a series of attacks on the Palestinians under the pretext of reminding them who has authority, this is called mowing the lawn.” Taken from the words of prominent professor and researcher at the University of Chicago, Professor John Mearsheimer.
Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis. January 09, 2025
Zeina Jamaluddine, PhD zeina.jamaluddine@lshtm.ac.uk , Hanan Abukmail, MD Sarah Aly, DO, Prof Oona M R Campbell, PhD ∙ Prof Francesco Checchi, PhD
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)02678-3/fulltext
Methods
We used a three-list capture–recapture analysis using data from Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) hospital lists, an MoH online survey, and social media obituaries. After imputing missing values, we fitted alternative generalised linear models to the three lists’ overlap structure, with each model representing different possible dependencies among lists and including covariates predictive of the probability of being listed; we averaged the models to estimate the true number of deaths in the analysis period (Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024).
In the study, published in The Lancet, the researchers used a statistical method called “Capture-Recapture.” This method, which has been used to estimate the death toll in other conflicts, relies on three lists:
1) a list from the Hamas Ministry of Health, including bodies identified in hospitals or morgues.
2) an online survey published by the Ministry of Health, in which Palestinians reported the deaths of their relatives.
3) a list of death notices posted on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, provided that the identity of the deceased is confirmed.
The researchers then looked for overlap across the different lists. “We looked at the overlap between the three lists (…) to get an overall estimate of the number of deaths,” says Zeina Jumadadin. Patrick Ball, a statistician at the US-based Human Rights Data Analysis Group – who was not involved in the Lancet study – has used the capture-recapture method to examine the death toll in the wars in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Colombia. “The Lancet study gives a good estimate of the ‘ongoing genocide’ in the Gaza Strip,” he says. Kevin McConvoy, professor of applied statistics at the Open University in the UK, agrees. “There are always uncertainties with incomplete data,” he says, adding that the researchers’ use of three different statistical analysis methods to validate their estimates is “commendable.” “Overall, I find these estimates to be largely reliable,” she emphasizes.
Zeina Jumaeddine admits she expects “criticism from all sides” to come to the study, as the fate of Gazans is at the center of an ideological debate. However, the researcher aims to counter what she calls the “obsession” with the death toll in Gaza. “We know that the numbers are very high anyway,” she says.
Our analysis suggests high mortality rates and substantial under-reporting of mortality due to traumatic injury in the Gaza Strip during the first 9 months of the Israeli military operation. We estimated around 64 260 deaths due to traumatic injuries from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024, implying 41% under-reporting in the MoH estimate over the same period and corresponding to approximately 2·9% of Gaza’s projected pre-war population (2 227 000), or approximately one in 35 inhabitants. Although we only analysed data up to June 2024, the official MoH estimate from Oct 7, 2023, to Oct 6, 2024, was 41 909. Assuming that the level of under-reporting of 41% continued from July to October 2024, it is plausible that the true figure now exceeds 70 000. Our study demonstrates the utility of integrating existing data from alternative sources, rather than relying on any single figure, to compose an estimate of both reported and unreported deaths in contexts affected by armed conflict and extreme violence. Our use of scraped social media data extends previous efforts by Airwars, a casualty tracking organisation, who found that during the first 3 weeks of the Israeli military operation, 75% of publicly reported decedents also appeared on the MoH list.
The estimated annualised mortality from traumatic injury of 39·3 per 1000 people is exceptionally high, surpassing rates seen during earlier conflicts in the Gaza Strip.8,29 Although daily traumatic injury mortality decreased since December, 2023, both the scale and age–sex patterns of traumatic injury deaths raise grave concerns about the conduct of the military operation in Gaza despite Israel stating that it is acting to minimise civilian casualties. The majority of deaths (59·1%) occurred among women, children, and older people, groups considered particularly vulnerable in conflict-affected settings and less likely to be combatants. The age–sex pattern of mortality during violent conflicts might help investigate the motivations of combatants, albeit only within a much broader evidentiary context. A lack of discrimination in killings by age and sex would manifest itself numerically as a relatively flat age–sex risk—eg, as described by the UN Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.30 Our estimates for deaths among women and girls broadly exhibit such a pattern. Among men and boys, we cautiously propose that two processes might be at work: a level of mostly non-discriminant killing across age and sex, with higher risk among young men explained by targeting of combatants (or those presumed to be) plus greater exposures to risk among this stratum—eg, because adult men are more often outdoors procuring supplies, working, or being first responders.
Our findings underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation. A recent commentary suggests a potential excess all-cause death toll of 186 000, but it applied multiplication factors from other conflicts (Burundi, 1993–2003; Timor-Leste, 1974–99) to estimate indirect deaths in the Gaza Strip, which might be inappropriate due to obvious differences in the pre-war burden of disease (compared with Burundi and Timor-Leste, the Gaza Strip featured a high burden of non-communicable disease and a very low burden of undernutrition and infectious disease, although infections have become an increasing challenge since October, 2023).31 Projections we previously coauthored suggested that in an escalation scenario, Gaza would have experienced 2680 excess deaths from non-communicable diseases, 2720 from endemic infectious diseases, 11 460 from potential epidemics, and 330 from maternal and neonatal health complications during the period from February to August, 2024. However, accurately measuring indirect mortality during an ongoing war is fraught with challenges and limitations. Although a ground survey could yield robust estimates, the highly unsafe conditions for humanitarian and health workers inside Gaza and access constraints currently make it unfeasible.
The Lancet also notes that the true number of civilians killed in Gaza is likely to be even higher, as its count only includes those who died from direct injuries and does not include indirect deaths – such as lack of medical care, food, water – nor the thousands of missing people buried under rubble. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said that around 10,000 Gazans who are still missing may be trapped under the rubble.
“We only included those whose deaths were confirmed by relatives or morgues and hospitals,” says Zeina Jum’eddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the study’s lead author. The findings undermine the credibility of the Israeli government and military – as well as much of the media, particularly French media – which has consistently questioned the figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, which the United Nations (UN) has previously called credible.
According to Amnesty International. First of all, we must shed light on the courts, the existing legal authorities of the world, the United Nations, the nature of the civil and social institutions of every country, including the most democratic societies. For the lovers of the ostentatious adornment and decoration of capitalism, all of these are the achievements of the stormy struggles of the masses!! A community that never attributes any value or role to any worker, as soon as it encounters the name of these shrines, forges a mountain of memoirs to connect them to the struggles of the downtrodden!! There is also the opposite of this orientation, some are content with saying that all of these institutions are formalities, they are not the source of goodness, but what is the reality? What do workers need to know? The answer can be summarized in a few points. Whatever institution, authority, court, convention, union, center exists in the world, in the political structure of every country, in the sphere of official international relations, has finally been created and has gained credibility with the agreement of governments.
There is no doubt about this. The question is, why have governments, the capitalist class of the world, or any country, seen themselves obliged to build or accept these shrines in order to solve which problem, to confront which internal problem of their class, in response to which protest of the rebellious and exploited masses, to satisfy which need of capitalist octopus’ relations? This is an important point that must be explored. Capitalism is a volcano of exploitation, separating the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants from work, the fruits of work, removing them from involvement in determining the fate of work, life, the originator of all forms of oppression, injustice, brutality, genocide, war, apartheid, Holocaust. This system, by its very nature, is full of explosive contradictions. On the one hand, it is the target of violence, struggle, uprising, revolution of the working masses. On the other hand, it is a quagmire of war and conflicts, competition, disputes between different sections of the ruling and opposition bourgeoisie over the distribution of shares of profit, property, power. After the second imperialist war, in order to eliminate the rebellious threat of the global labor movement, resolve the internal conflicts of the world bourgeoisie, and consolidate the foundations of the hegemony of the dominant pole, the United Nations engineered a vast network and subsidiary institutions. It created and fielded the High Commissioner for Refugees, the Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, the Women’s Rights Commission, the Hague Criminal Court, etc. Let us clarify again, there is no doubt that capitalism has established many of these under the pressure of the workers’ campaign. What is being consciously or unconsciously hidden is that the capitalist class and the capitalist state did not create these to solve the problem of the working masses or reduce the pressure of worker exploitation!!
Capitalism has consented to the architecture, the establishment of these institutions, the conclusion of these conventions, in order to remove from itself the danger of revolts, uprisings, and struggles of the discontented masses, to extinguish these raging struggles. So that the workers will fall in love with these institutions, consider them miraculous, and abandon their history-making organization against the Soviet power. These have emerged under the pressure of the wave of our struggles, but they play the role of a bulwark of the bourgeoisie in confronting our campaigns and a weapon of capital to suppress our anti-capitalist class struggle.
Apart from statesmen and capitalism’s mercenary intellectuals, no fair person free from capitalist brainwashing has any doubts that the criminal attack on Gaza and the massacre of many children in this country was carried out completely and totally by the Netanyahu government and with very shameless support of the United States: s government and its west allied powers. For our part, as always, we ask all workers in the world to campaign against the genocides of the rulers of Israel, America, Germany, England, France in Gaza, the West Bank or elsewhere. Capitalism’s power to kill and oppress and create annihilation must be answered with a united labor movement and international liberation force. The great cursed inhabitants of Gaza and all of Palestine are part of the working class of the world. For 75 years, Israel and predatory capitalist governments have aimed for genocide and annihilation. The release of these people is an urgent and unavoidable issue for the international labor movement, and we, as a cell of this movement, call with the loudest voice to all chained people around the world to stand up against these genocides, holocausts and the barbarism. Stop the wheel of work and production from turning. Stop the cycle of reproduction of global capital. exercise power and order the liberation of the Palestinian workers as a link in the international chain of the human liberation struggle with the great history-making power.
The audience of our voice is not the corridors of power, the profit-seeking oppositions seeking a share of sovereignty and ownership, but the workers, the subjugated, the exploited, the oppressed. With the echo of this voice, we ask free humanity to protest against the burning of people, the genocide, the massacre of tens of thousands of small children. The killing of people with hunger whips, the dropping of hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs on the two million people who fell from the shelters in Gaza by the government of Israel, the government of the United States, all supporting governments and the continued genocide for 75 years. 100 years of planned anti-humanitarian planning by the global bourgeoisie has been applied against the displaced and oppressed masses of Palestine, recognize all this as a holocaust as great as the Nazi holocaust in the second imperialist war, and fight together against the founders, perpetrators, supporters and partners of this holocaust.
With the issuance of this indictment. A field is opened for discussion, analysis, criticism, support, opposition and controversy in different languages, with different approaches. Sites can be used in this area; we take the help of the sites and channels we have to move the work forward. Let’s try so that more people and groups start collecting pictures of the most heartbreaking, terrible and sad scenes of this holocaust. They should try to expose the crimes of the governments as widely as possible. Photographers, journalists, political activists protesting against genocide and barbarism show everything they have. Everyone, including us a group of the anti-capitalist Iranian workers and activists in the movement for the abolition of wage labor has a report, has written an article or given an interview. Whoever did a translation, it has unspoken words, everyone wrote an analysis, whoever found a place for collective active influence.
One of the greatest conquests of capitalism is that the entire social possibilities have stamped the issue of the class struggle of the world’s workers with the seal of impossibility and have engraved this impossibility on the consciousness of the working masses. In this, of course, the left has also claimed to be the standard-bearer of the liberation of the working class. The impossibility of fusing the liberation of the accursed Palestinians with the class struggle of the world’s workers has also been of the same kind and a product of the brainwashing machine of capital. It was under the influence of this engineering of capitalist ideas that what was formed under the name of the Palestine Liberation Movement was actually devoid of all indicators that guaranteed victory. Beating the drum of nationalist anti-occupation, a Palestinian homeland, the formation of two states, and similar illusions was not only not a path to any victory, but it also continuously wore out this movement, drove it into the abyss of ruin, trapped it in defeat after defeat, and led it towards disaster. All Palestinian organizations, groups, and political forces from left to right, secular to religious, did this. There is no question of denying the differences; the distinction between Islamic reaction and secular leftist nationalism is evident. The discussion is not about denying these differences. The main point is that they are all equally dependent on capital, buried in the winding prescriptions of capital, peering from the vantage point of capitalist observation at the world, history, the horizon of the campaign, the path to liberation. Worse and beyond, from the beginning until today, they have been waiting for the miracles of governments, the poles of power, staring at the corridors of decision-making and the role-playing of the beasts that guard the survival of capitalism. They expect the designers, planners, and founders of genocides to turn off the crematoriums. They seek refuge from this court to another, from one shrine to the next. What is missing in their calculations is a conscious, planned, organized, and strategic reference to the vast masses of the working class of the world, to all layers, approaches, and sections of this class, to workers in factories, farms, transportation, the media, the young generation, to workers in education at all levels, treatment, medicine, or any other field. The Palestinian resistance and liberation movement did not and does not have a nationalist solution.
The liberation of the Palestinian workers is the cause of the protesting masses of the world working class. This protest has now flared up and can become more intense every day. The tragedy is that even the young generation of the Palestinian working class has not yet understood the intensity, the greatness of the miraculous power of this blaze. At least on a global level, this generation has played every role in the last 14 months, every success it has achieved has been in the light of the companionship, solidarity, and comradery of the world’s working masses. It was the workers who stopped the trains carrying weapons from the governments to Israel from moving, forced the ships carrying ammunition from the governments to Israel to stop and unload them in ports. It was the workers who, on May 1 this year in Chicago, the birthplace of International Workers’ Day, made this day a day of campaign against any aid from capitalist governments to Israel, the genocide of the world bourgeoisie in Palestine.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/siege-gazas-water
One of two Mekorot pumping stations outside the village of Bardala. These pumping stations have caused springs in the villages of Ein al-Beida and Bardala to dry up completely, forcing the Palestinian community to be entirely reliant on the Israeli state-owned company for their domestic and agricultural water provision. © Amnesty International
Since Israeli authorities do not recognise the right of many Palestinian communities to live in Area C and refuse to allow them the necessary infrastructure, these families have no access to running water even though a Mekorot pipeline runs along the side of the highway less than 100 meters from their land. To get water they must go twice a day to the local water filling point run by the Mekorot company. © Amnesty International
Swimming Pool in Ma’ale Adumim. With water supply roughly four times greater than that provided to Palestinian communities, Israeli settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim stand in stark contrast to their Palestinian neighbours. © Amnesty International
Lush vegetation in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. With a population of 37,670, the settlement is one of the largest in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. © Amnesty International
Grape harvest in the Israeli settlement of Psagot, July 2017. The winery at Psagot was founded in 2003 and according to its official website, produces around 350,000 bottles of wine a year, 70 percent of which is exported internationally. Grapes are high value, water intensive crops. © David Silverman/Getty Images
An Israeli settlement date farm close to the village of Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, 21 September, 2017. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods produced in Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land are exported internationally each year, despite the fact that the vast majority of states have officially condemned the settlements as illegal under international law. © Amnesty International
A water filling point on the outskirts of the village of Al-Auja in the Jordan Valley. For Palestinians with no access to running water the situation is dire. To meet their basic needs, they have no choice but to purchase additional water from tankers, usually twice a day. The water is often of dubious quality and is more expensive than that supplied through the water network. © Amnesty International
The store is located in an old pump house for a well which was sunk in 1966 with permission from the Jordanian authorities who controlled the West Bank at the time. A year later, after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, the Israeli authorities stopped Qais Nasaran’s family from using it. There was water in the well until 2014 when it finally dried up. Qais explained how, each year, when the well was full, the Israeli military would check to see no one was using it.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — Children in sandals trudge through water contaminated with sewage and scale growing mounds of garbage in Gaza’s crowded tent camps for displaced families. People relieve themselves in burlap-covered pits, with nowhere nearby to wash their hands.
The Siege of Gaza’s Water
Collection and conclusion: Hassan Abbasi