Juan Cole
Informed Comment / September 29, 2024
Here are the first few paragraphs of my long essay for The New Lines Institute on the Israeli use of water as a weapon of total war in Gaza. Read the whole thing here.
The Israeli use of water as a weapon of war in Gaza in 2023-2024 turned what had been a perennial public health crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe. The targeting of wastewater treatment facilities, which no longer exist at all in several Gazan cities, seems calculated to provoke health crises for the Palestinian civilian population. It is for this reason, among others, that South Africa charged the Israeli government with the crime of genocide1 before the International Court of Justice, a charge the court found “plausible” in January. Two days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant announced at the Israeli army Southern Command in Beersheba, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Although he did not mention water, that was cut off, too. Gaza has faced a potable water crisis for two decades. Some 90 percent of well water in the Strip comes from the Coastal Aquifer Basin. It was over-exploited, however, especially along the coast, causing levels to drop and exposing it to seawater intrusion from the Mediterranean, especially beginning around 2000. The rise in the sea level owing to anthropogenic climate change is also implicated here. In addition, the Israeli siege of Gaza had often crippled sewage treatment, so sewage seeped into the aquifer, as did chemicals from manufacturing workshops. Israel’s use of treated wastewater for irrigation close to the border with Gaza also caused saline return flow into the aquifer. Only four percent of this ground water is considered potable.
Clean water was brought in by private trucks in tanks or was produced by small desalinization units in Gaza itself or was piped into Gaza from Israel by the Mekorot water authority, which provided about 12 percent of the water in the strip. Israel is using water as a weapon in Gaza – an action characterized as a war crime. This essay will examine the state of the crisis in November 2023, February 2024, and July 2024. Snapshots of the Israeli-imposed water crisis in Gaza illustrate the situation’s unfolding.
November 2023: ‘Dehydration and Malnutrition’
By Nov. 18, over a month into the Israeli campaign, the World Food Program (WFP) of the United Nations urgently announced that Gaza was experiencing extensive food and water shortages. A senior WFP spokeswoman, Abeer Etefa, declared at a press conference, “We are already beginning to see cases of dehydration and malnutrition, which are increasing rapidly.” Since 2007, Israel had enforced an economic blockade on the Gaza Strip. As a result, the inhabitants of Gaza had relied on aid for survival. Aid agencies delivered 500 trucks’ worth of supplies into the strip daily before Oct. 7. Only a fraction of such deliveries continued after the attack. WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said at a press conference in mid-November, “With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters, and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation.
Israeli ground assaults west of Gaza City also created life-threatening conditions. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) observed that “households in the western neighbourhoods of Gaza city appealed for help after their remaining food and drinking water had been depleted. Reportedly, they were unable to leave their homes because of the presence of Israeli ground troops and fighting.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) cautioned in mid-November that 70 percent of Palestinians – men, women, and children – in southern Gaza lacked access to clean water. Moreover, raw sewage started flowing in the streets in some areas.
Read the whole thing at New Lines .
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
