By Shereena Qazi
On the morning of October 9, Gaza residents woke up to an acute water shortage affecting over 650,000 people.
The water taps in the besieged territory began to dry up soon after the Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz announced cutting off essential supplies like food, water and electricity to Gaza as a retaliation to the October 7 Hamas attack.
A Gaza resident Abdul Munim, 23, said when he heard the news, he immediately started worrying about his twin 6-month-old baby boys.
"How will I be able to make their bottles if we don't have access to clean drinking water?" Munim tells TRT World.
The power outage imposed by Israel also deprives Palestinians of groundwater pumping or running desalination plants.
Israel holds the key to Gaza’s water pipelines and also controls desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast. With the crippling siege, even sewage treatment facilities have come to a halt due to the power cut.
According to OCHA, the last functioning desalination plant ceased operation on October 15 due to fuel shortages, as did the previous operational wastewater treatment facility, causing additional amounts of untreated sewage to be discharged to the sea.
'We have no option'
Israel briefly restored water supply to the southern part of Gaza for three hours on Monday. Still, according to the UN relief agency in Gaza, this provision only reached 14 percent of the population.
Fuel shortages and airstrikes have also led most water trucks to suspend operations, and bottled water is severely limited and unaffordable, according to the UN. Most people currently get drinking water from private vendors who run small desalination facilities that are mostly powered by solar energy and are severely rationed.
In desperation, people are digging wells in coastal areas adjacent to the sea. Forced to drink contaminated groundwater, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of contracting waterborne diseases.
Many residents rely on salty tap water from Gaza's only aquifer, which is contaminated with sewage and seawater. The water also contains nitrates drawn in from agricultural fertilisers and human and animal waste. About 96 percent of the aquifer’s water is considered undrinkable, according to United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
"We don't have any other option; what can I do? My children need milk, they need to be fed," Munim says.
"Why is the world quiet? Israel is openly depriving us of our basic needs".
As per UN experts, denying water amounts to a war crime as it violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention. Israel however claims to have restored water in southern Gaza and reopened the Rafah crossing for humanitarian aid. According to local accounts, only 20 trucks of aid with limited resources have entered Gaza.
"What's happening here is that we are viewed as subhumans, and the international community is enabling Israel by supporting it politically and militarily and by every possible means," Zayneb al Shalalfeh, a water practitioner at Palestinian Women Water Practitioners Network, tells TRT World.
Al Shalalfeh explains that the current water production capacity stands at a mere five percent of the typical daily output, and it continues to decline.
"Mekorot, the water supply from Israel, usually meets 13 percent of Gaza's water needs, roughly 53,000 m3 daily. However, there has been a coordinated interruption in the supply between October 9 and October 15.”
"Additionally, three desalination plants, with the capacity to produce seven percent of Gaza's water supply, are presently not operational. These short-term low-volume desalination facilities can generate between 18,000-32,000 m3/day, but they require electricity or fuel to function," al Shalalfeh says.
The availability of bottled water in the market could be much higher. The cost of bottled water has surged significantly, making it unaffordable for the average Gaza family.
Water - a tool for domination
Historically, taking control of water and seizing it has been a tactic for colonisers to drive people from their land. This strategy has been used in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.
Even though a Joint Water Committee was established in a 1995 agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel still has the power to say no to any Palestinian water plans. There are no limits on how much water Israel can take from the land it occupies.
"Israel has controlled 80 percent of the water resources in the West Bank, and according to the Oslo Accords, water remains under Israeli control,” Abdelrahman Tamimi, director of Palestinian Hydrology Group and professor at Arab American university, tells TRT World.
Tamimi explains that a Jewish settler in the occupied West Bank consumes six times the amount of water for drinking purposes as compared to the Palestinian citizen, at 350 litres per person per day, while the Palestinian per capita consumption is 60 litres per person per day.
"During the past 55 years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has controlled the surface and groundwater resources, severely restricted the development of Palestinian water resources and continued to utilise and exploit the shared water resources in the West Bank for the use of Israeli settlements."
In Gaza, Munim describes the situation as a ‘race for survival’.
“If dehydration, waterborne diseases, and contamination do not kill you, airstrikes will, so I am just doing my best to protect my family and survive,” he says.
“If contaminated water helps us survive right now, we are okay to drink it. We have no other choice”.
