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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Gaza's next crisis might be worse than anything we have ever seen</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Dr Ramzy Baroud - March 30, 2022</div></div>
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<p>"The water is back," one family member would announce in a mix of
excitement and panic, often very late at night. The moment such an
announcement was made, my whole family would run to fill every tank,
container or bottle that they could find. Quite often, the water supply
would only last for a few minutes, leaving us with a collective sense of
defeat and worrying about the likelihood of surviving.</p>
<p>That was our life under Israeli military occupation in Gaza. The
tactic of holding Palestinians hostage to Israel's water "charity" was
widespread during the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993) to the
extent that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2950709" target="_blank">denying</a>
water supplies to refugee camps, villages, towns or whole regions was
the first measure taken by the Israeli occupation forces to subdue the
rebellious native population. This was often followed by military raids,
mass arrests and deadly violence; but it almost always began with
cutting off the water supply.</p>
<p>Israel's water war on the Palestinians has changed since those days,
especially as the climate change crisis has accelerated the <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/" target="_blank">apartheid</a> state's need to <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/israel-s-problematic-role-in-perpetuating-water-insecurity-for-palestine/" target="_blank">prepare</a>
for grim future possibilities. Of course, such preparation is largely
at the expense of the occupied Palestinians. In the West Bank, for
example, the Israeli government continues to usurp Palestinian water
resources from the region's <a href="https://www.agronomy.org/files/jnrlse/issues/2001/e00-23.pdf" target="_blank">main mountain and coastal aquifers</a>. Frustratingly, Israel's Mekorot water company then <a href="https://theecologist.org/2014/mar/22/water-apartheid-palestine-crime-against-humanity" target="_blank">sells</a> stolen Palestinian water back to Palestinian villages and towns, especially in the <a href="https://stopthewall.org/2016/06/16/mekorot-cuts-water-tens-thousands-palestinians/" target="_blank">northern West Bank</a>, at exorbitant prices.</p>
<p>Aside from the ongoing profiteering from water theft, Israel
continues to use water as a form of collective punishment in the West
Bank, while frequently <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/" target="_blank">denying</a> Palestinians, especially in Area C, the right to dig new wells to circumvent the colonial-occupation state's water monopoly.</p>
<p><strong>READ: <a title="The billion dollar deal that made Google and Amazon partners in the Israeli occupation of Palestine" href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220322-the-billion-dollar-deal-that-made-google-and-amazon-partners-in-the-israeli-occupation-of-palestine/">The billion dollar deal that made Google and Amazon partners in the Israeli occupation of Palestine</a></strong></p>
<p>According to Amnesty International, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/" target="_blank">consume</a>, on average, 73 litres of water per person, per day. Compare this with the amount that an Israeli citizen <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/6/23/israel-water-as-a-tool-to-dominate-palestinians" target="_blank">consumes</a>, approximately 240 litres of water per person, per day. Even worse, look at how much illegal Israeli Jewish settlers <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/6/23/israel-water-as-a-tool-to-dominate-palestinians" target="_blank">consume</a>:
over 300 litres per person, per day. The Palestinian allotted share of
water is not only far below the average consumed by Israeli citizens,
but also below the recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita
set by the World Health Organisation.</p>
<p>As difficult as the situation for West Bank Palestinians is, in Gaza
the humanitarian catastrophe is already having a dreadful effect. On the
occasion of World Water Day on 22 March, Gaza's Water and Environmental
Quality Authority <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/world-water-day-gazas-underground-water-supply-faces-dangerous-salinity-crisis/" target="_blank">warned</a>
of a "massive crisis" should the besieged territory's water sources
continue to be depleted at the current dangerous rate. The authority's
spokesman, Mazen Al-Banna, told reporters that 98 per cent of Gaza's
water supplies are not fit for human consumption.</p>
<p>The consequences of this terrifying statistic are well known to
Palestinians and, in fact, to the international community as well. Last
October, Muhammed Shehada of the Geneva-based Euro-Med Monitor, <a href="https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/slow-poisoning-97-of-gaza-s-water-undrinkable-50500" target="_blank">told</a>
the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council that about one-quarter
of all diseases in Gaza are caused by water pollution, and that an
estimated twelve per cent of deaths among Gaza's children are "linked to
intestinal infections related to contaminated water."</p>
<p>The question is, how did Gaza get to this point?</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_545823" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GettyImages-1238342603.jpg?fit=933%2C622&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1" alt="A picture shows a view of Wadi Gaza, a wetland area in the central Gaza Strip on 9 February 2022. [MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images]" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="261"></p><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">A
picture shows a view of Wadi Gaza, a wetland area in the central Gaza
Strip on 9 February 2022. [MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images]</p></div><p>On
25 May last year, four days after the end of the latest Israeli
military offensive against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the charity
Oxfam <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/after-bombing-gaza-struggles-restart-power-water-hospitals-markets-and-fishing-its" target="_blank">announced</a>
that 400,000 people in the Gaza Strip have no access to regular water
supplies. This is hardly surprising, given that Israeli military
offensives always begin with the bombing of Palestinian electricity
grids, water networks and other vital public infrastructure. According
to Oxfam, "Eleven days of bombardment… severely impacted the three main
desalination plants in Gaza city."</p>
<p>It is important to keep in mind that the water crisis in Gaza has
been ongoing for years, and every aspect of this protracted crisis is <a href="https://ceobs.org/new-study-on-infrastructure-damage-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/" target="_blank">linked</a>
to Israel. With damaged or ailing infrastructure, much of Gaza's water
has a dangerously high salinity level and is polluted by sewage as well
as chemical fertilisers washed down from Israeli settlements.</p>
<p>Even before Israel <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sc8479.doc.htm" target="_blank">redeployed</a>
its forces and moved its settlers out in 2005 to impose a siege on the
Palestinian population by land, sea and air, Gaza had a water crisis.
Its coastal aquifer was entirely <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140673613626045" target="_blank">controlled</a>
by the Israeli military administration, which diverted quality water to
the few thousand Jewish settlers, while occasionally allocating highly
saline water to the then 1.5 million Palestinian residents, as long as
the Palestinians did not protest or resist the Israeli occupation in any
way.</p>
<p>Nearly 17 years later, Gaza's population has <a href="https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/brief-report-on-the-population-of-palestine-at-the-end-of-2021/" target="_blank">grown</a> to 2.1 million, and its already struggling aquifer is in a far worse shape. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) <a href="https://blogs.unicef.org/blog/searching-clean-water-gaza/" target="_blank">reported</a> that water from Gaza's aquifer is depleting due to "over-extraction (because) people have no other choice."</p>
<p>UNICEF <a href="https://blogs.unicef.org/blog/searching-clean-water-gaza/" target="_blank">added</a>:
"Worse, pollution and an influx of seawater mean that only four per
cent of the aquifer water is fit to drink. The rest must be purified and
desalinated to make it drinkable." When electricity supplies are
subject to frequent disruption, this is a tortuous process.</p>
<p>In other words, Gaza's problem is not the lack of access to existing
freshwater reserves as the latter simply do not exist or are depleting
rapidly, but the lack of technology and fuel that would give
Palestinians in Gaza the ability to make their water at least nominally
drinkable. Even that, though, is not a long term solution, because
Israel is doing its utmost to destroy any Palestinian opportunities to
recover from this ongoing crisis.</p>
<p>Moreover, it seems that Tel Aviv is only invested in making the
situation worse to jeopardise Palestinian chances of survival. For
example, last year the Palestinians accused Israel of deliberately <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210122-israel-floods-farmlands-with-rainwater-in-eastern-gaza/">flooding</a>
thousands of acres of land in Gaza when it opened the sluices on its
southern dams, which the state uses to collect rain water. This by now
almost annual ritual by Israel continues to devastate Gaza's ever
shrinking farming areas, the backbone of Palestinian survival efforts
under Israel's hermetic siege.</p>
<p>The international community usually pays at least some attention to
Gaza during times of Israeli bombardments, but even then the response is
mostly negative, with Palestinians accused of provoking Israel into
acting in "self-defence". The truth is that even when Israel's military
campaigns end and its bombs stop falling on Palestinian civilians, Tel
Aviv continues to wage war on the Gaza Strip's inhabitants.</p>
<p>Although it is powerful militarily — it is a nuclear-armed state,
after all — Israel claims that it is facing an "existential threat" in
the Middle East. In the real world beyond Israeli propaganda, it is the
existence of the people of occupied Palestine which is under threat.
When almost all of Gaza's water is not fit for human consumption because
of a deliberate Israeli strategy, it is easy to understand why
Palestinians continue to resist the Israeli occupation as if their lives
depend on it. The simple truth is that their lives do depend on it.
Without adequate water supplies, they will die. Unless the international
community sits up, takes notice and actually does something about water
supplies in the Gaza Strip, the next crisis might be worse than
anything we have ever seen.</p>
<p>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.</p>
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