972+ Magazine reports that since the onset of the conflict, Israel has created an unprecedented health crisis by depriving Palestinians in Gaza of clean drinking water, now verging on causing irreversible environmental damage by using water as a weapon in its current assault on the Gaza Strip.
The magazine, in a report by Nancy Murray and Amahl Bishara, recalled the warning of the UN special rapporteur Pedro Arrojo Agudo, who insisted that Israel “must stop using water as a weapon of war,” pointing out that the toll of deaths due to water scarcity could surpass the fatalities caused by the Israeli bombing itself.
The deprivation of Gaza’s water, described as a weapon of mass destruction, was a fundamental tactic in the war from the start. Israel cut off the pipelines feeding the Strip on October 7, 2023, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declaring that Israel “imposes a full blockade on Gaza: No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and behaving accordingly.”
The “use of water as a weapon” was included in South Africa’s accusation against Israel before the International Court of Justice, as mentioned by other researchers and human rights figures, including Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in his resignation letter.
South Africa’s petition highlights the intensification of long-standing violent policies against the Palestinian people, with the denial of water and destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank a part of Israeli efforts to “make daily and decent living more difficult for civilian populations,” as described by the UN fact-finding mission in 2009.
Health and Environmental Catastrophe
For decades, Israel has used the seizure of water to strip Palestinians of their land and way of life, impeding agriculture in the West Bank.
However, Israel’s current use of water as a weapon in its attack on the Gaza Strip is at a completely different scale, with the potential to cause an unmatched public health crisis and permanent environmental damage.
The magazine notes that Gaza’s near-total reliance on Israel for water and energy makes it vulnerable to the manipulation of these essential resources as weapons against it. Gaza purchases about 30% of its water from Israel and relies on electricity and fuel, which Israel also controls, to purify the rest.
Since the start of the war, the blockade and intensified Israeli bombing have caused a significant water supply shortage. The World Health Organization has reported that power cuts mean there is not enough energy to operate water wells, desalination and purification plants, and sewage services. UNICEF, which opened a desalination plant in 2017, noted that people are forced to drink highly saline water from the sea.
By late October, a US State Department internal report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 infants under six months old were forced to drink a potentially lethal mix of sewage-contaminated and sea-salted water.
The World Health Organization cites that in the southern city of Rafah, over one million displaced Palestinians have an average of one toilet for every 486 people, while one bathhouse in all of Gaza serves on average 4,500 people. Consequently, sewage flows in the streets, contaminating tents hastily set up for hundreds of thousands of people across southern and central Gaza.
Another alarming and potentially long-term tactic that Israel has used in recent weeks is pumping seawater into Gaza’s tunnels, ostensibly to destroy the tunnels and drive out Hamas activists. The Wall Street Journal reported that this measure could also “threaten Gaza’s water supplies.” South Africa’s memorandum expressed “grave concern” about this particular use of water as an offensive weapon.
South Africa’s memorandum referred to the UN special rapporteur on the right to water comparing the Israeli plan to the legendary Roman “salting” of Carthaginian fields to prevent crop growth and make the region uninhabitable, meaning that “these conditions deliberately imposed by Israel are intended to destroy the Palestinian community in Gaza.”
Water as a Human Right
The authors urge activists and human rights organizations to unequivocally oppose Israel’s use of water as a weapon. They say, “As activists with the U.S.-based Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, we have seen how Israel’s long-standing discriminatory water policies have been used to control and expel Palestinians from their land, and we have also witnessed how water activism can mobilize people across continents to fight for justice.
As the International Court of Justice considers allegations of genocide against Israel, we call upon water researchers and activists to consider endorsing this open letter, which outlines Israel’s discriminatory water policies over the past decades and calls for an end to the use of water as a weapon in the Gaza Strip.”
