Water in the West Bank: Nor Yet a Drop to Drink
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Can you imagine not having enough water or electricity?
Rates of chloride and nitrates have reached alarming levels:
Palestinian child transporting his family's bottles, filled with potable water from a purification station, in Deir al-Balah central Gaza Strip, on May 22, 2013. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/APA Images) -
“The frequent power outages have also made it extremely difficult for the municipalities to provide citizens’ homes with water around the clock. Local municipalities pump water for less than four hours a day, a very limited period for Gaza’s residents."
Over ninety percent of Gaza’s water wells are unsafe for human consumption [Mondoweiss]
Why didn’t Newsweek publishing this in its US edition?
Pollution, salinity and rationing are threatening Gaza’s water supply
“Due to a decade-long Israeli blockade, nearly two million in the Gaza Strip are facing a water crisis that has impacted the quality and quantity of water in the small seaside geographical area of no more than 360 square kilometers.”
Another example, among hundreds, of water as a weapon
A young Palestinian boy from the West Bank village of Fasayil, Jordan valley, seen walking with a water pipe in the village. May 14, 2015. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Bedouins families in the Jordan Valley must spend a third of their income purchasing water.
Small Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley must struggle for even the smallest bit of water while nearby Israeli settlements have plenty.
“More than 90 percent of the West Bank’s Jordan Valley region are Palestinians. Less than 10 percent are Israeli settlers. Yet when it comes to water distribution, it turns out, we see a different distribution: settlers are entitled to between eight and nine times more water, while Palestinian communities are subject to a policy of water deprivation. In fact, this is a policy of ethnic cleansing, whose goal is a Jordan Valley bereft of Palestinians.”
How Israel is drying out Palestinians in the Jordan Valley [via 972+ Magazine]