Bi-Weekly Brief: March 22, 2024 (World Water Day)
Israel deploys water as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war
The theme of this year’s World Water Day - “Water for Peace” – collides with reality in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Israel with US backing defies international law and has turned water into an aggressive weapon of war.
The West Bank
In the five months since the Gaza War began, Israeli settlers have staged 650 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank resulting in casualties and damage to property, including to water resources. Settlers and soldiers have contaminated Palestinian wells, demolished irrigation reservoirs, and destroyed water tanks and pipelines.
As Alliance ‘Water Facts’ attest, targeting Palestinian water sources is an old Israeli practice. In 2021-2023 alone, settlers and the army seized or destroyed an estimated 160 Palestinian reservoirs, sewage networks and irrigation ponds, damaged water pipes, poured concrete into wells and pumped wastewater from settlements onto Palestinian agricultural lands. “Over the first half of 2023, authorities knocked down almost the same number of Palestinian water installations as they did all of last year,” according to the August 19, 2023 Associated Press.
In Haaretz (March 17) Erella Dunayevsky, a long-time Israeli peace activist with 20-year-long ties to farmers in the South Hebron Hills, said that the intensity and absolute impunity with which settlers are carrying out their attacks is something new. Settlers “pour motor oil into wells, cut the cord of the generator, vandalize water tanks. What is being done under cover of the war is unlike anything before. The settlers are running the South Hebron Hills, the army and the police. They don’t answer to anybody, and they’re abusing the local people. They do whatever they please, because for them this is ancestral land and they want to drive off the people who live there. This desire is backed by the government.”
According to the West Bank Protection Consortium, in addition to “a surge in violence from settlers against water and sanitation systems,” water access is increasingly imperiled by Israeli checkpoints and road closures that prevent Palestinians reaching their water sources.
On February 1, the Biden Administration placed sanctions on four Israeli settlers and expanded the sanctions on March 14 to include three additional settlers and two settler outposts. But it has not taken action against National Security Minister Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich, two settler cabinet ministers who are vigorous proponents of emptying the West Bank’s Area C of Palestinians and have been masterminding Israel’s latest phase of settlement expansion. In Smotrich’s words, the US sanctions represent “a surrender to the BDS movement, which is meant to denigrate the State of Israel and end the settlement enterprise and create a Palestinian terror state."
The Gaza Strip
If preventing access to water is being used to enable Israel to grab more West Bank land, the denial of water in Gaza is being wielded to advance Israel’s genocidal war aims. On October 7, 2023 Israel shut off the pipes supplying the Gaza Strip with water and two days later, Defense Minister Gallant announced that Israel was a “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”
Within days, the amount of water reaching Gaza’s residents had dropped by 95 percent, as airstrikes damaged six water wells, three water pumping stations, one water reservoir and a desalination plant serving half of Gaza’s population. By October 19, Gaza’s residents had to rely for drinking, cooking and hygiene on only three liters per day or less, with those crowded into UN shelters receiving only one liter per day. The World Health Organization puts the minimum amount of clean water needed in emergency situations at between 7.5 and 20 liters per day. Soon there were reports of people being forced to drink seawater and water extracted from polluted agricultural wells, and water-borne disease rapidly spread.
In March 2024, OCHA reported that only one of the three water pipelines bringing water from Israel was partly operational, that 83% of Gaza’s groundwater wells and all of the water treatment plants were non functional, that only two of the three main desalination plants were partly working and that no clean water was reaching the north. The extent of the damage to Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure and the impact on health are detailed in this PAX report. Drinking polluted, heavily salinated water has dangerously weakened resistance to disease, as dehydration and deliberately-engineered famine begin to take the lives of children. In the words of the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, “Before the war, Gaza was the greatest open air prison. Today it is the greatest open air graveyard.”
Gaza is not just being deprived of water. Water is also being harnessed as an offensive weapon in a manner that could forever destroy this vital, already endangered, natural resource.
At the end of January, Israel confirmed that it was pumping seawater into tunnels in the Gaza Strip in an effort to destroy them and drive out Hamas fighters. When it prepared to conduct a trial of the procedure in northern Gaza in mid December, environmentalists voiced concerns that the flooding of tunnels could eradicate what remains of sweet-water in the fragile Coastal Aquifer, Gaza’s sole freshwater source, which was already 97% contaminated. One Israeli water expert expressed worry that “the negative impact on groundwater quality would last for several generations, depending on the amount that infiltrates into the subsurface,” and said that he would “hesitate about destroying a massive natural resource.” .
Mark Zeitoun, author of Power and Water in the Middle East: the Hidden Politics of the Palestinian-Israeli Water Conflict, declared that Israel’s action “will turn a vulnerable resource into a catastrophic one….Flooding the freshwater aquifer with seawater would go against every norm humanity has ever developed, including the environment aspects of international humanitarian law/rules of war and the recent principles on the protection of environment in relation to armed conflict and all the progress made towards criminalising harm to the natural environment: ecocide.”
Israel’s war on Gaza threatens to make its entire environment unlivable for many years to come.
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