News Roundup: Ramadan 2016 Water Crisis

To compensate for the water cut, Palestinians have resorted to buying water tanks to meet their basic needs. The added expenditure of 250 shekels is a financial burden for many families who cannot afford it.

Israel cuts water in West Bank during Ramadan [via Gulf News]


Can you imagine going without water for a week?

"On the first day of Ramadan, the water stopped for 24 hours, with no notice," Afaneh told Al Jazeera. "Since then, it has been coming in at less than half the capacity. We've done everything we can to try and make residents comfortable, but this is a crisis."

Israel's water cuts: West Bank 'in full crisis mode' [via Al Jazeera]

Source: Getty Images via Al Jazeera

For the past three weeks, the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians around Salfit and Nablus have revolved around water…On the morning of June 4, we discovered that our main water reservoir, with a capacity of 1,500 cubic meters, was completely empty,” Salfit Mayor Dr. Shaher Ishtayeh told Haaretz last week. No one warned the local council in advance that Mekorot [Israel’s water supply company] was cutting off the supply for a day.

Palestinian City Parched After Israel Cuts Water Supply [via Haaretz]


How Israel uses water as a weapon of war →

Good summary of what is happening now as well as a history of water as weapon from 1948 on:

Israel has been ‘waging a water war’ against Palestinians, according to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah. The irony is that the water provided by “Mekorot” is actually Palestinian water, usurped from West Bank aquifers. While Israelis, including illegal West Bank settlements, use the vast majority of it, Palestinians are sold their own water back at high prices.

Palestine’s ‘prayer for rain’: How Israel uses water as a weapon of war [via Informed Comment]

Essential Reading: Water as a Tool to Dominate

If you only read one article linked to on our blog, read this one at Al Jazeera.

Since it occupied the West Bank in 1967, Israel has laid hands on Palestinian water resources through discriminatory water-sharing agreements that prevented Palestinians from maintaining or developing their water infrastructure through its illegal planning and permit regime. As a result, thousands of Palestinians are unable to access sufficient water supplies and became water-dependent on Israel.

Israel: Water as a tool to dominate Palestinians [via Al Jazeera]

News Roundup: June 2016

An important piece from Israeli journalist Amira Hass on Israel’s water wars:

Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God.

Israel Incapable of Telling the Truth About Water It Steals from Palestinians [via Haaretz]


Israel intends to destroy a water-holding tank that serves 20 families of Palestinian shepherds and their flocks in the northern Jordan Valley.

Israel Plans to Destroy the Only Water Source for Shepherds in West Bank Village [via Haaretz]


Even when clinics receive new surgical instruments, these are swiftly destroyed by factors far outside the control of Gazan surgeons. This is because the water supply in Gaza is so contaminated that many clinics rely on sea water to clean surgical instruments—and ‘this just corrodes it all,’ the surgeon said.

Unexpected Details Ram Home the Scale of Gaza Crisis [via SciDev]


This UNICEF article [PDF] addresses inequitable access to water in the West Bank, as well as Gaza’s water supply, which is unfit for human consumption due to sewage, agricultural infiltration, and salt-water intrusion from the sea.

About one million West Bank Palestinians consume 60 litres of water per capita per day or less, significantly below the WHO recommendation of 10.

December 2013: Protecting children from unsafe water and inadequate sanitation [via UNICEF State of Palestine News]

Water Justice & Environmental Racism in the US

Although our focus is on water justice in Palestine, we care about water justice everywhere. In that spirit, we want to share these two articles:

Flint, Environmental Racism, & White Privilege →

We are witnessing a national catastrophe: Innocent people are fighting for their lives because officials at all levels have been derelict in their duties to protect Flint, Michigan, residents from environmental harms and have deliberately silenced community voices. Could this Flint toxic water disaster occur anywhere else? Yes, and it is, even in California, where the drought is not the only water crisis.

Water Activists, Your White Privilege Is Showing [via Truthout]


The type of environmental exploitation that the residents of Uniontown face every day is impossible to explain without taking race into account. The town’s numerous problems reflect an abject failure at every level of government to value residents’ — Black residents’ — lives and health

In This Poor, Black, Polluted Alabama Town, Speaking Up Gets You Sued [via ACLU]

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