[News] Israel lays claim to Palestine's water

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http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99995037
Israel lays claim to Palestine's water

10:15 27 May 04



Israel has drawn up a secret plan for a giant desalination plant to supply 
drinking water to the Palestinian territory on the West Bank. It hopes the 
project will diminish pressure for it to grant any future Palestinian state 
greater access to the region's scarce supplies of fresh water.

Under an agreement signed a decade ago as part of the Oslo accord, 
four-fifths of the West Bank's water is allocated to Israel, though the 
aquifers that supply it are largely replenished by water falling onto 
Palestinian territory.

The new plans call for seawater to be desalinated at Caesaria on the 
Mediterranean coast, and then pumped into the West Bank, where a network of 
pipes will deliver it to large towns and many of the 250 villages that 
currently rely on local springs and small wells for their water.
   <http://www.newscientist.com/news/javascript:displayWindow('/misc/popup_ns.jsp?id=ns99995037F1',262+40,936+40)>
Access to fresh water

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  Access to fresh water

Israel, which wants the US to fund the project, would guarantee safe 
passage of the water across its territory in return for an agreement that 
Israel can continue to take the lion's share of the waters of the West 
Bank. These mainly comprise underground reserves such as the western 
aquifer, the region's largest, cleanest and most reliable water source.

For Israelis, agreement on the future joint management of this aquifer is a 
prerequisite for granting Palestine statehood.


Global funding

The first public hint of the plan emerged earlier in May in Washington DC. 
Uri Shamir, director of water research at the Technion, the Israel 
Institute of Technology in Haifa, told the House of Representatives 
Committee on International Relations that the desalination project was "the 
only viable long-term solution" for supplying drinking water to the West Bank.

Shamir told New Scientist this week that the project could be complete in 
five to seven years. "The plant will be funded by the world for the 
Palestinians. Israel will not be willing to carry this burden, and the 
Palestinians are not able to."

But other leading hydrologists contacted by New Scientist point out that 
desalinating seawater and pumping it to the West Bank, parts of which lie 
1000 metres above sea level, would cost around $1 per cubic metre.

"The question is whether an average Palestinian family can afford it," says 
Arie Issar, a water expert at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Sede 
Boker, Israel, who helped green the Israeli desert a generation ago by 
finding new water sources in the region. "It would be foolish to desalinate 
water on the coast and push it up the mountains when there are underground 
water resources up there, which cost only a third as much."

Tony Allan of King's College London, a leading authority on Middle East 
water, agrees: "Pumping desalinated water to the West Bank is not the best 
technical or economic option."

But the project is being supported by Alvin Newman, head of water resources 
at the Tel Aviv office of USAID, the US international development agency, 
which would fund the desalination project. "Ultimately it's the only 
solution," he said in an interview with New Scientist.


Unusual cooperation

Water supply is one of the few areas where cooperation between Israel and 
Palestine has survived the current intifada. Every day on the West Bank, 
Palestinian engineers help repair and maintain Israeli water pipes, and 
vice versa.

But Palestinian water negotiators are deeply uneasy about the plans being 
drawn up on their behalf, especially if they involve abandoning claims to 
the water beneath their feet. "We cannot do that. We don't have the money 
or the expertise for desalination," Ihab Barghothi, head of water projects 
for the Palestinian Water Authority, told New Scientist.

Palestinians badly need more water. Under the Oslo agreement they have 
access to 57 cubic metres of water per person per year from all sources. 
Israel gets 246 cubic metres per head per year. And in the nearly 40 years 
that Israel has controlled the West Bank, Palestinians have been largely 
forbidden from drilling new wells or rehabilitating old ones.

The region's sources of water are the West Bank aquifers; the river Jordan, 
which rises in the Golan Heights and flows into the Sea of Galilee, where 
it is largely tapped by Israel; and the coastal aquifer, an increasingly 
polluted reserve of underground water that extends south to the Palestinian 
territory of the Gaza Strip.


Sewage effluent

Over the years, Israel has developed a good reputation for using water 
efficiently, and in the 1980s it began recycling sewage effluent for 
irrigation. In 2004, Israel signed a deal to buy water shipped by tanker 
from Turkey.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip depend almost exclusively on 
small wells tapping the coastal aquifer. As the water table falls, the 
aquifer is becoming increasingly polluted by salt water from the sea. UN 
scientists say Gaza will have no drinkable water within 15 years.

Despite earlier efforts to develop desalination, the Israel government only 
decided to invest heavily in the technology in the past four years. Some, 
including Israeli liberals and Palestinian optimists such as Barghothi, 
believed that once Israel began desalinating seawater for its own use it 
would be prepared to relax its grip on the West Bank aquifers.

But now it appears that Israeli water planners see desalination as a means 
of retaining control of those aquifers.

The desalination plant to supply the West Bank would parallel a similar 
US-funded reverse osmosis plant to fill taps on the hard-pressed Gaza 
Strip. The scheme has already been approved and funded, but is currently on 
hold because of continuing conflict in Gaza. Taken together, the two 
schemes would leave an independent Palestine more dependent on desalination 
than almost any other nation in the world.


Fred Pearce, Jerusalem



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