Israel has weaponised water and engineered a scarcity in Gaza by attacking infrastructure, blocking items needed for pumping and desalination, and killing people who transport it, experts have told The National.
More than six months after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that ended two years of war in the Palestinian enclave, access to what should be a basic right has remained a daily struggle for its residents.
“Gazans face an engineered water scarcity and endure entirely preventable, dire sanitation and hygiene conditions, which directly harm their health, dignity and safety,” Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Tuesday in a report titled “Water as a Weapon”.
Since October 2023, Israel has destroyed 725 wells and 1,400km of water and sewage pipelines, according to data from the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem, a non-profit that works for greater Palestinian control over their natural resources.
Israel's national water company, Mekorot, provides the territory with water through three pipelines that run to Gaza city in the north, Deir Al Balah in central Gaza and Khan Younis in the south, all of which have been damaged.
Earlier this month, Israel killed two Unicef contractors in an attack at the Mansoura water filling point in northern Gaza – the only one serving water tankers that supply Gaza city, Unicef said. Two other people were injured in the attack.
This was just the latest in a string of similar attacks on water supply lines, lorries and stations. In September, Israeli forces opened fire at a clearly identified MSF water distribution lorry, clearly shooting at its tanks, even though the vehicle's route was communicated to Israeli authorities in advance, the organisation said.
“The attack cannot be dismissed as an error,” MSF said in its report. The report also said the frequency and severity of Israel's attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure have affected water, sanitation and hygiene activities, even in areas it deemed safe or humanitarian zones.
Israel also continues to block essential items needed for the maintenance and repair of pipelines and pumping stations. Only 16 of Gaza's 78 sewage pumping stations are working, the territory's water and sanitation authority, CMWU, said on Saturday.
With no means of repairing them, as Israel continues to deny the entry of machinery, equipment, pumps, generators, pipes, fittings and even engine oil, tens of thousands of cubic metres of raw sewage have seeped into Gaza's groundwater aquifer. This has resulted in the spread of preventable diseases, particularly among children, experts have told The National.
“Even safe water has become unsafe,” said Laureline Lasserre, MSF's emergency humanitarian affairs manager for Gaza. “This resulted in the prevalence of skin diseases like scabies and diarrhoeal diseases, which mostly affect women and children who are more prone to dehydration.”
In a study from May to August last year, MSF found that a quarter of Gaza's population suffered from diarrhoeal diseases.
With Israel's military occupying more than half of Gaza under the ceasefire deal, its 2.1 million people are crammed into the remaining area, which is under Hamas control. The impact on people is not only physical – it also contributes to psychological harm caused by already dire living conditions, seen in the form of suicidal thoughts, Ms Lasserre added. Israel described MSF's report as “baseless claims”.
“Assertions that Israel uses water as a 'weapon' are factually incorrect and ignore a simple truth: the only party weaponising humanitarian aid is Hamas,” Israel's Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat) wrote in a post on X. It accused MSF of employing “individuals linked to terror”, without providing evidence.
Jad Isaac, head of the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem, said Israel's dominance over Gaza's water is not merely a form of “collective punishment”, but also a part of its exercise of control.
“It's the matrix of control seen in the West Bank and Gaza where Palestinians have no true sovereignty over a single inch of their land,” Mr Isaac told The National. “Everything needs Israeli approval, whether it comes to land or water.”
Deliberate acts
Israel also controls all of the territory's border crossings and imposes restrictions on what and who goes in and out of Gaza. As part of MSF's international staff, Ms Lasserre herself was forced to leave on Israel's orders. “It's a problem that was created while blocking off alternatives and solutions to it,” she said.
Zakariya Amayreh, the Norwegian Refugee Council's project manager for water, sanitation and hygiene in Gaza, said fuel had started to come in, but oil for engines, lubricants and spare parts are “very rare in the market and are extremely expensive”.
The price of engine oil has rocketed from 20 Israeli shekels ($6.70) a kilo to 1,000 shekels, he said.
“We fear that Gaza will be forgotten and that this dire situation [the ceasefire] that’s as dire as before will be normalised and tolerated,” Ms Lasserre said.
