Israel has systematically undermining Palestinians’ access to water for decades (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Israel’s assault on Gaza over the past two and a half years has exposed its brutality to the world. The images on our screens show the deadly impact of airstrikes and the suffering of displaced people forced to live in freezing tents.
Genocide, for many people, means mass murder of a people or causing them bodily harm.
But genocide is multi-dimensional. It also means “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part,” according to the UN.
Israel is systematically undermining Palestinians’ access to the thing that sustains all life—water.
As Eyal Weizman writes in the book Ungrounding, Israel has aimed to reduce Gaza to nothing but scorched earth, where even the locations of former farms and homes are no longer discernible.
“The surviving population of Gaza was reduced to bare existence, subject to unrelenting hunger and thirst under the ever-present hum of killer drones and bomber jets,” he writes.
The severe shortage of water faced by Palestinians is not a natural outcome of living in a Middle Eastern desert. It is an effect of the systematic use of thirst as a weapon.
Rainfall in Jerusalem is comparable to that in Berlin. Prior to Israel’s foundation, Palestinian farmers were able to grow a variety of crops such as olives, citrus fruits, watermelons, cucumbers and grains, including for export. They made use of the possibilities for irrigation as well as the fertile soils.
Even in the south of the country where rainfall is lower, farmers were able to adapt. In drought years they might not be able to grow wheat. But they could grow barley that is more able to withstand dry conditions.
Yet colonisers were influenced by racist assumptions that the south of Palestine was a desert wasteland that needed to be tamed by civilised Europeans. The idea that “Israel made the desert bloom” seeped into the popular consciousness.
For decades, Israel was an extremely unsustainable user of water. Through much of the 20th century, drought was a source of anxiety for Zionist settlers as agriculture soaked up a large portion of the water supply.
But Israel has seen rising economic growth and technological development. It now promotes itself as a world leader in water management, especially the use of desalination plants and a mega‑pipeline known as the National Water Carrier. Israel promotes an image that is in stark contrast with its surrounding countries which are still facing a water crisis.
In the 21st century, Israel began to produce so much water that exported water to surrounding states.
A 2014 article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz argues, “Now, the ability to produce all the water that’s needed, whether for human consumption or for agriculture, may soon change our way of life and perhaps even bring peace closer.”
Israel exported water to Jordan in exchange for energy from solar power. This was part of the apartheid state’s project of normalising its existence with Arab states.
Glowing promotional videos began to talk about Israel’s “water miracle”. Israeli engineers came to see climate breakdown as a technological problem that can be managed with innovation and financial investment. But the problem of supplying people with access to water is not only an issue of technology.
It cannot be resolved without addressing the power Israel has over Palestinians’ water supplies.
As journalist Charlotte Silver writes, we shouldn’t accept Israel’s claims to water supremacy at face value. “Israel doesn’t have a ‘water problem’ because it steals water from Palestinians,” she says.
Israel controls the mountain aquifer, an underground water source. Most of this water source lies underneath the West Bank. But Israel over extracts water from it, pillaging resources from occupied land.
It also takes more of its share of the coastal aquifer that it shares with Gaza. Israel has diverted water from Wadi Gaza so that it never reaches the strip. And it has dramatically depleted the River Jordan.
Many Palestinian communities in the West Bank are forced to purchase water from the Israeli state-owned company, Mekorot. In the summer it cuts back the supply to the West Bank to meet higher seasonal demand in Israeli settlements.
All talk of making the desert bloom is meaningless when Israel has created an artificial desert for the Palestinians.
Climate breakdown is set to increase drought as the temperature rises. The region will also be hit by periodic bursts of very heavy rainfall.
Extreme weather conditions will impact all the people living in the area of historic Palestine. But Israelis will be much more able to cope with its effects than Palestinians.
While Israel cuts Palestine’s access to water, its citizens enjoy swimming pools in the city of Tel Aviv and escape to lush oases of green in national parks.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are finding ways to survive. More than 90 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank store water on their rooftops to try to cope with shortages.
In 2024, people in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, started using solar power to pump water when the desalination plant had to be shut down through lack of fuel.
These everyday acts of resistance to water theft should be celebrated. But Palestinians need a lasting political solution—the right to return to land they have been displaced from and to be free of Israeli occupation.
Seven months on from the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, Israel continues to murder Palestinians, with over 1,000 deaths since October.
Palestinians in Gaza also face the slow violence of severe limits on the amount of drinkable water they can access.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, some 90 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed or damaged. Israel has repeatedly bombed the pipelines.
Israeli restrictions mean it is difficult to bring spare parts and equipment into Gaza to fix destroyed infrastructure. There is a complete ban on steel and cement entering Gaza because Israel says these items can be used for military purposes.
Israel maintains a military presence in 64 percent of Gaza, east of the “yellow line”. Sections of damaged pipeline within these areas can’t be repaired. And Israeli airstrikes have damaged the electricity supply for desalination plants.
This means that the majority of Palestinians in Gaza rely on deliveries of water by road in trucks.
Omar Saada in Khan Younis said, “We wake up as early as 6am to be able to collect water from the trucks. Before, it was available from early morning until after noon, but now it is usually just for two hours.
“It sometimes causes intestinal infections and stomach pain due to contamination, but we are forced to drink it because it is the only water available.”
Israel claims that Gaza has access to piped water via its state-owned water company, Mekorot. But the Israelis target water engineers and drivers.
In April this year the Unicef aid agency suspended its operations after Israel killed two truck drivers in an airstrike.
They were filling trucks at the Mansoura water filling point, the only operational truck filling point for the Mekorot water supply line serving Gaza City. Trucks from Mansoura deliver water to hundreds of thousands of people in the city.
The sanitation crisis in Gaza is set to worsen as the weather gets hotter. Over a million displaced people in camps live without sewage networks.
The limits on the amount of water available forces people to choose between drinking, cooking or washing. People report wounds becoming infected because people cannot wash them. Women do not have enough water to wash after menstruating or giving birth.
In January this year, a video appeared of a man dressed in black smashing a water pipe with a hammer near the settlement of Ein Samia in the West Bank.
The following month, masked settlers invaded the Ein Samia pumping station late at night, destroying pipes and monitoring equipment.
Workers fled in terror. The attack cut off water for 12 hours after.
Mohammad Abu Ayyash, water operations director at the Jerusalem Water Undertaking, told CNN news that the pumping station had been attacked like this ten times in the first four months of the year.
Since 2023, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have faced a rising wave of attacks by Israeli settlers.
These attacks focus on water infrastructure as the settlers try to force Palestinians to leave the land and claim it for themselves.
According to the Pacific Institute think tank that tracks water-related conflicts, Israeli armed forces and settlers have attacked Palestinian water sources 250 times in the space of five years.
There are also numerous accounts—from the 1948 Nakba to today—of settlers poisoning wells by throwing in objects including used nappies and chicken carcasses.
Palestinian farmer Mohammad Sawafta is from Bardala in the Jordan Valley. It is part of a huge swathe of land targeted for annexation in plans laid out by Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich last year.
Sawafta used solar panels to draw water from a well to irrigate crops. But now he can no longer access the well and cropland. They have been fenced off by settlers.
“We can’t reach the well, we go to it and they come immediately to us,” he said. “Why am I leaving and they are staying and grazing on my land?
“My dream and my hard work, 30 years, all of it lost in one moment. For farming, for animals, for drinking, water is life. Without water, no life.”
The Israeli Defense Forces are meant to stop the attacks, which are illegal under both Israeli and international law. But the armed forces either do nothing or join in the violence.
Depriving Palestinians in the West Bank of water is, according to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, a deliberate and carefully planned policy.
It is done so Israel “can rob them of what little possessions and land they have left and take over as much territory as possible, all in order to continue its settlement project and the dispossession of Palestinians.”
Stop Heathrow's third runway
Unite union rep speaks on deal
Data centres trash environment
