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Gaza’s water “comes from wells with salt water unfit for consumption. They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants. When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.” That was the opinion of Giora Eiland, adviser to the defense minister and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, 2023.
Already by November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “around 70% of the population in Gaza is drinking salinised and contaminated water.” By July 2024, Oxfam reported that “people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day” since the start of Israel’s offensive, well below the World Health Organization’s minimum needed for survival in a humanitarian emergency.
Israel's control over life’s most essential resource did not arise overnight. After occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it quickly established a system to extract water for its own use while restricting Palestinian access. For decades, this policy forced the indigenous population into dependence and precarity, while Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — illegal under international law — enjoyed “privileged access to water.”
Codifying Control, 1967 to 1993
By 1967, Israel was already “pumping and siphoning off underground waters of the West Bank,” using wells drilled inside its own territory. This “constituted five-sixths of the West Bank waters.” In fact, in a top-secret 1949 telegram — just a year after Israel’s founding — the U.S. Under Secretary of State reported that the British Foreign Secretary had expressed concern about the “situation arising from Israeli claims to territory [on] both sides [of] upper Jordan which would give them complete control [of] all water resources.”
Two months after seizing the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli authorities issued the first of three orders on water in the West Bank. This August 1967 order placed all authority over water access and use under the military.
A second order, issued in November, required a permit to own, operate, or build any system for extracting or processing water. These permits could only be obtained from military authorities, who could refuse them “without giving any explanation.”
The following year, a third order granted the Israeli Military Area Commander power to revoke any water and land transactions, even those previously ratified by a civil court.
Israeli exploitation extended to all three water sources in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the Jordan River, the Mountain Aquifer, and the Coastal Aquifer (the aquifers are underground water reserves, tapped through wells). Between 1967 and 1990, 53% of land in the West Bank and 42% of land in the Gaza Strip was confiscated. Since then, Palestinians have been denied access to the Jordan River’s water. Agricultural settlements were also established “on the most fertile land” and sites with abundant groundwater.
“Israeli authorities have exercised firm control over Palestinian water resources,” reported the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1989, adding, “Some 460 of the 720 Palestinian wells in existence prior to 1967 have been destroyed, have dried up or have been expropriated.”
While 36 deep-bore artesian wells were “drilled for use by Israel and its settlements” since 1967, the report notes, only five new wells were “permitted for Palestinian use.” A separate U.N. report counted seven permits granted from 1967 to 1980, and noted that even when Israel granted Palestinians these permits to drill wells — “under heavy public pressure” — it did so only for domestic use, not irrigation.
In the 1970s, Israel also started requiring the installation of meters on wells in the occupied territories, allowing only “meager quantities of extraction” to Palestinians. These quotas were “woefully inadequate to meet the population’s needs.”
Israeli settlement plans accompanied the exploitation of water. In July 1967, Labor Minister Yigal Allon presented a plan that included a proposal for the occupied West Bank. “The so-called ‘Allon Plan,’ submitted to the cabinet on July 26, was never formally adopted as government (or even Labor Party) policy; but it was to remain the unwritten platform of Israel’s Labor-led governments down to 1977, and of Labor in opposition thereafter,” Israeli historian Benny Morris notes.
Water played a central role in shaping the proposed map. According to Morris, the Allon Plan would have Israel “retain a six–seven-mile-deep strip along the west bank of the Jordan [River].”
The CIA criticized the plan in a confidential 1969 memo, stating that “Israel unrealistically feels that the Allon Plan is a workable solution.” It warned that the plan would perpetuate boundaries that “isolate people in a subsistence economy,” and would turn the West Bank into “another Gaza Strip—larger in area and population but burdened by the same inadequate resources.”
“In 1970, the [settlement] efforts were directed mainly at making the Allon plan operational, a plan which provided for the annexation of a third of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley,” a 1980 U.N. committee study noted. “Five of the six settlements established by Israel that year were in the fertile valley of the Jordan.”
The settlement enterprise came at the expense of Palestinian water access. Residents of Furush Beit Dajan “mentioned that the aquifer is being exhausted by Israeli wells” which supply the Hamra and Mehora settlements, Amnesty International reported. “According to Azim Mifleh, a farmer from the village, Israeli wells started pumping in the vicinity of the village in the [1970s] and slowly the local wells lost their efficiency.”
The pattern repeated, with Israeli infrastructure siphoning what once supplied the indigenous population. “In al-Auja, a village of about 5,200 people, 10 kilometres north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, the situation is much the same,” Amnesty International reported. In 1972, Israel’s state-owned water company “sunk a well and established a pumping station, close to the Wadi Auja spring. According to residents, the spring used to provide a plentiful supply of water to the village and surrounding agricultural land via a series of irrigation channels.”
This state of affairs persisted for decades, continuing past the Oslo Accords.
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New Plan, Same Water Scarcity: 1993 to 2023
The Oslo Accord, signed on September 13, 1993, resulted from secret negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The agreement established an interim system for a “period not exceeding five years,” with “permanent status negotiations” set to begin by the start of the third year. Oslo II, also an interim agreement, followed in September 1995.
Two months after the second accord, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by “an Israeli who opposed [the accords] on religious grounds.” Then, after the May 1996 elections, Netanyahu and his Likud Party, who “had historically opposed Palestinian statehood and withdrawal from the occupied territories,” came to power and remained in government until 1999. In July 2000, U.S. President Clinton hosted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat at Camp David “in an effort to reach an agreement on permanent status,” but no agreement was reached.
As a result, Oslo II has yet to be replaced, keeping Israel in control of “all water resources in the Occupied Territories.” While the accord stipulated that “Israel recognizes the Palestinian water rights in the West Bank,” it listed “maintaining existing quantities of utilization from the resources,” as one of its principles. It thus left Palestinians with access to only 20% of the water from the Mountain Aquifer.
Oslo II also established the Joint Water Committee (JWC), “comprised of an equal number of representatives from each side,” to handle “all water and sewage related issues in the West Bank.” It required the JWC to reach all decisions “by consensus.” B’Tselem noted that Israel turned the JWC “into an instrument for promoting its own interests, after emptying the Palestinians’ veto power of meaning. It dictated that projects intended for Palestinians be discussed together with projects intended for settlements as a ‘package deal,’ thereby obliging the Palestinians to support settlement expansion.”
While the accords allocated “approximately 80 percent of the waters pumped from the aquifers in the West Bank” to Israel, leaving “the remaining 20 percent for Palestinian use,” even access to this share has been limited for Palestinians due to roadblocks built into the JWC’s structure. Palestinians in the region have instead been forced to pay Israel for water.
“Due to the non-approval of permits for the construction of Palestinian wells, the Palestinian Authority [PA] has not been able to extract the full amount of water as allocated by the Oslo Accords in some aquifers,” the Office of the U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Process notes. “Instead, the [PA] is required to purchase water from the Israeli water provider, Mekerot, at a high cost.”
Hydrogeologist Clemens Messerschmid, who worked in the West Bank for eight years, wrote that in the decade following Oslo II, permits to drill water wells “were very difficult to obtain,” even in the aquifer system unconnected to Israel. “The licensing procedure often took years and several times Israel demanded repositioning of drilling locations. Sometimes, proposed locations were rejected with the open ‘justification’ that this location might be used in the future to drill wells for illegal Jewish settlements.”
A U.N. committee reported that Palestinian municipalities, such as Ramallah, “have been refused permission to drill wells unless they would also supply nearby Jewish settlements or have been forced to link up their municipal systems to the Israeli network, which gets its water supply from the ground-water of the city of Ramallah itself.”
When permitting rules are violated, the consequences can be swift and severe. A farmer living in the northern West Bank village of Ein al-Beida told Amnesty International that Israeli authorities cut off the village’s water supply for five days, after accusing the villagers of using more than their allotted amount. Two families living nearby also had their houses and property destroyed twice in two years, including all of their water tanks in one instance.
In most of the West Bank, Israel even exerts control over rainwater collection. Amnesty International reports that cisterns for collecting rainwater are also “often destroyed by the Israeli army.”
In 2008, the Israeli military demolished nine cisterns built with European Union funding. They were intended to irrigate about 9-11 hectares of farmland on which 3,200 trees were planted. According to a farmer who spoke to Amnesty International, “they went up and down several times with the bulldozer and uprooted everything.”
“Water tanks are good for target practice; they are everywhere and are the right size to aim at and calibrate your weapon, to relieve your frustration, to teach a lesson to the kids of the neighbourhood who threw stones at you and you couldn’t catch; or to break the monotony of a stint of guard duty,” an Israeli soldier told Amnesty International.
Meanwhile, Israel continued to over-exploit the region’s water resources, contributing to the steady deterioration of the Jordan River. By 2007, the Lower Jordan River was estimated to carry only about “2% of its natural flow.” Two years later, Amnesty International reported that the Jordan’s flow through the West Bank had “been reduced to a trickle, of highly saline water heavily contaminated by untreated sewage.”
As for the Mountain Aquifer, “Palestinians have access to one fifth of [its] resources,” the World Bank reported in 2009. Palestinians draw “about 20% of the ‘estimated potential’ of the aquifers that underlie both the West Bank and Israel. Israel abstracts the balance, and in addition overdraws without [JWC] approval on the ‘estimated potential’ by more than 50%, up to 1.8 times its share under [Oslo II]. Over-extraction by deep wells combined with reduced recharge has created risks for the aquifers and a decline in water available to Palestinians through shallower wells.”
Even before the 2023 offensive, the situation in Gaza was dire. While Israel does not limit extraction from the Coastal Aquifer, “extraction by Israel from this aquifer in the area to the east of Gaza affects the supply available to be extracted in Gaza.” Its annual sustainable yield is insufficient for Gaza’s population. “Israel does not allow the transfer of water from the Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank to Gaza,” according to Amnesty International. A notable restriction, given that about a quarter of the water Israel extracts is taken from the Mountain Aquifer, nearly 80% of which is replenished by rain in the West Bank. This has resulted in long-term over-extraction of the Coastal Aquifer by as much as double its annual sustainable yield.
The overexploitation of this aquifer — the only water resource available to Palestinians in Gaza — led to a deterioration of the water supply. By 2009, 90 to 95% was “polluted and unfit for human consumption.”
Between 2008 and 2009, during ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ Israeli attacks targeted Gaza’s “water wells, water networks, waste water facilities and water tanks,” causing “an estimated [US $6 million] of damage.” During military operations in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 12% of Gaza’s wells and damaged “over 33,000 metres of water and wastewater networks.” This left 450,000 people without access to municipal water as of early September, even after 80% of priority repairs had been addressed.
Water scarcity is a fixture of Palestinian daily life. Ethnographer Anita De Donato worked in the West Bank Dheisha refugee camp from July 2009 to January 2010. She noted that, in public events, water availability is “considered as a symbol of the honour and status of the family organizing the meeting, displayed and negotiated through the ritualized practices of hospitality and generosity, like the offering of coffee.” Conditions are marked by the constant need to ration and conserve what little water is available:
“In order to satisfy the daily needs of domestic water, the large families living in the houses in the refugee camp, which often comprise three or four generations, have to ration the water stored in the cisterns, locally called ‘water of the cisterns’ (mayya al‑khazzānāt). To have a wash, every member of my host family uses a little quantity of water, drawing it from a pail with a little bowl or a glass. During my fieldwork, I learned to wash using just three or four glasses of water. People in the house flush the toilet when there are feces, but not urine, with a bowl of dirty water, used before to wash the clothes.”
In contrast, Israeli settlements, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice, have privileged access to water, with “lush vegetation,” well-irrigated farmlands, and even swimming pools and wineries. Their water supply is prioritized during the hot season, to the detriment of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the number of settlers continues to rise. In 1992, the U.N. estimated that about 268,000 settlers lived in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan. By 2024, that number had grown to around 700,000 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone.
Israel has carved out more and more Palestinian territory, taking over water-rich areas, until more than a third of all land in the West Bank was rendered “off-limits or tightly controlled to Palestinians.” These areas were then turned into settlements, military bases, nature reserves, or even firing ranges for use by the Israeli military.
As history shows, Israel’s ability to manufacture water scarcity did not arise overnight. It was created through decades of systematic occupation, during which Israel came to control the very means to sustain Palestinian life.