Water Fact – November 6, 2023
A ‘textbook case of genocide’ is on display in Gaza with no end to bombardments and no clean water to drink
That’s what Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called Israel’s war on Gaza in his blistering October 28th resignation letter.
“The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine,” he wrote. “What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”
With the known toll of slaughtered Palestinians now above 10,000 – who knows how many bodies are buried under the rubble? - Israel’s relentless airstrikes have been killing a child every 10 minutes. Save the Children stated on October 29 that “the number of children reported killed in Gaza in just three weeks has surpassed the annual number of children killed across the world’s conflict zones since 2019.”
While the Biden Administration has refused to call for a ceasefire – it prefers a ‘humanitarian pause’ which Netanyahu bluntly rejected on November 3 - an internal State Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink potentially lethal water polluted with sewage and salt.
Drinking seawater can be deadly for humans, leading to dehydration and organ failure. For babies and fetuses the combination of salty and polluted water causing severe diarrhea is a likely death sentence.
On October 28, the aid group Action Against Hunger warned: “Gaza is dying of thirst. 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip urgently need clean water…more than half of the water supply infrastructure is currently damaged and in need of repair….people are rationing water and drinking only one liter a day. Water tankers have no fuel. Desalination plants don’t work. You can’t access groundwater without fuel to pump it into the water network…Dehydration, extreme fatigue, along with thirst and dehydration or concentrated urine, which could mean that many people are suffering from kidney failure, are some of the symptoms we are starting to see.” The over 640,000 Gazans in UNRWA shelters can expect only one-half liter of clean water – amounting to two glasses - a day.
Action Against Hunger called for the immediate entry of fuel to be able to pump water, re-start desalination and wastewater plants and enable trucks to distribute water: but fuel is precisely what Israel has bannedfrom the pitifully few trucks (374 between Oct. 21 and Nov. 2) that have been permitted to enter through the Rafah Crossing. Before the war 550 trucks carrying fuel, water, food, medical equipment and educational material entered the blockaded Gaza Strip on a daily basis. But even then the fuel that made it into the Gaza Strip was not sufficient to keep electricity on more than eight hours a day.
Now there is no refrigeration to preserve whatever food is on those trucks, and lentils and rice cannot be cooked without fuel. Very limited supplies of fuel which UNRWA and UNICEF had in storage were distributed to keep 20 pumping stations and two desalination plants in southern Gaza working at 40 percent capacity. By November 2, these sources of water shut down as fuel was exhausted. On the same day three trucks entered Gaza with 100,000 liters of water, enough for 20,000 people for a single day. The only other source of clean water is a limited supply from two pipelines erratically serving southern and middle Gaza which international pressure had induced Israel to turn on. On Nov. 4, PBS quoted UN deputy Mideast coordinator Lynn Hastings as saying that one of those pipelines was not working and “many people are relying on brackish or saline ground water, if at all.” The third Israeli pipeline serving northern Gaza and Gaza City remains turned off, and at least 25 sewage pumping stations in the north have ceased functioning.
As for the food supply, according to the UNRWA director for Gaza, “the average Palestinian in Gaza is living on two pieces of Arabic bread made from flour the United Nations had stockpiled in the region.” Despite starvation conditions “now people are beyond looking for bread. It’s looking for water.”
As Gaza faces a catastrophic water, sanitation and food crisis and over half of its hospitals are shut down because of damage or lack of fuel, Israel is intensifying its bombing of hospitals and ambulances, schools, mosques and churches that are serving as emergency shelters, as well as densely-packed refugee camps, wiping out entire families in a second. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, by November 2 Israel had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on more than 12,000 targets in the tiny Gaza Strip, roughly equivalent to the nuclear explosives that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
In this heart wrenching BBC interview a pediatric intensive care doctor from the UK who has been training medical teams in Gaza for the past decade called the situation “an avalanche of suffering that is unprecedented in modern times” and “a stain on our collective humanity.” Israel and the US call it a legitimate exercise in self-defense and continue to oppose a ceasefire which mass demonstrations around the globe have been demanding.
The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine is holding its next Stand Out for Gaza on Wednesday, November 15 from noon to 1 pm at the First Baptist Church, 633 Center Street, Jamaica Plain. Please join us!
Friends, if you would like to be on a list about Alliance standouts and demonstrations in the Boston area, please contact us at waterjusticeinpalestine@gmail.com
photo from Boston rally