11. In the Gaza Strip, the total water supply for domestic use is 99,058,677 million cubic meters,13 which is supplied by either municipal or UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)’s water wells, private desalination plants or other private vendors.14 As much as 95.4 percent of water comes from groundwater, 2.6 percent from desalinated water, and 2 percent is purchased from Mekorot.15 The main source of groundwater is the coastal basin or aquifer, which extends across Gaza’s north-eastern border (see Figure 1).

12. The coastal aquifer is the source of about 86 percent of all water in the Strip.16 Already in 2012, a UN study warned that the aquifer could become unusable by 2017, with the damage irreversible by 2020.17 Indeed, in the absence of a coordination policy between Israel and the Gaza water utility, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), both have extracted an excessively large amount of water from the coastal aquifer. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) estimated that in 2018 the annual sustainable recharge of the aquifer, which is fed only by rainwater, was extracted almost three times over.18 Over-extraction, along with sewage infiltration and groundwater deterioration, have consistently contributed to the continued deterioration of water quality and quantity in Gaza.

13. In addition to issues relating to the costal aquifer as the main source of water for the two million Palestinians living in Gaza, the situation of water and the enjoyment of the human rights to water and sanitation in the Strip are affected by three underlying pressures directly related to the occupation of Palestine.

14. The first of these is, of course, the consequences arising from the serious crime of population transfer19 conducted by Israel during and after the first Israeli–Arab War of 1947–48. The ethnic cleansing operations of Zionist Israeli forces20 led to the expulsion of some 780,00021 Palestinians (85 percent of the total population) from 23 towns and 351 villages across Palestine, with 60–80,000 Palestine refugees fleeing into the Gaza Strip and quadrupling the population within weeks.22

15. The Israeli military’s further destruction of 108 villages and village points in the nearby Naqab region, to Gaza’s east, and the concentration of the remaining population in a regulated enclosure (siyāj) in 1951–5323 created another wave of internally displaced persons into the Gaza Strip. This added further pressure on the region’s water resources and sanitation infrastructure, whereas over 70 percent of the Gaza Strip’s current population is composed of those refugees and displaced persons.

16. The second causative factor affecting Gaza’s water scarcity is Israel’s diversion of the natural aquifer flowing toward the Gaza Coast from Jabal al-Khalil in the southern West Bank. This Israel has achieved through a series of deep wells and pumps to prevent the natural replenishment of Gaza’s ground water, which is vital for the densified population.

17. The third and more-recent pressure on Gaza’s water resources arises from the methods of colonization of the Gaza Strip that took place from 1972 through 2005. The Jewish Israeli settlers who established agricultural colonies in the Gaza Strip in that period consumed 400 times the land available to the Palestinian refugees, and 20 times the volume of water they used. These highly water-intensive farming enterprises were erected atop the three main deep pockets of fresh groundwater, depleting them irrevocably.24 These factors combined are directly attributable to Israel’s colonization and further occupation of historical Palestine and emphasize how the Gaza Strip’s hydrology reflects the military, demographic and resource-management forces that Israel has introduced to the region.

18. In the Gaza Strip, the issues around water for Palestinians became more dire in 2007, when Israel imposed its land, air, and sea blockade and comprehensive closure, which forms part of the Israeli Government’s campaign to separate and fragment Palestinian communities within the oPt, and elsewhere, and to deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, including permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources. Considered a collective punishment under international law, the blockade and closure policy continue to this day.

19. These factors bear heavily on the normative content of the human right to water, as provided in the CESCR’s General Comment No. 1525 and how availability, affordability, acceptability and quality of water affect other human rights of the people in Gaza. At the nexus of the human right to water and the human right to health, the latter is affected by the availability and likely quantity of water that will be collected at different levels of service. The estimated quantities of water at each level of service may be reduced where water supplies are intermittent and the risks of ingress of contaminated water and/or sea water, as in Gaza, into domestic water supplies increase. Where optimal access is achieved, but the supply is intermittent, a further risk to health may result from the compromised functioning of waterborne sanitation systems.

20. The public health gains derived from use of increased volumes of water typically occur in two major increments. The first relates to overcoming a lack of basic access, where the distances and time involved in water collection result in use of volumes inadequate to support basic personal hygiene and may be marginally adequate for human consumption.

21. Where the basic access service level has not been achieved, hygiene cannot be assured, and consumption requirements may be at risk. Therefore, providing a basic level of access is the highest priority for the water and health sectors.26 However, even the case of desalinated water in Gaza is a matter of institutionalized material discrimination and disparity.

22. While the Gaza Strip has been systematically denied its natural sources of water, combined with the consequences of past and ongoing population transfer, Israel currently desalinates so much seawater that its municipalities are unwilling to accept it. Excess desalinated water is being used to irrigate crops, and the country’s water authority has even use it to refill Lake Tiberias itself,27 which is ironic considering that the lake water continues to be pumped to Israeli populations in the arid south. There is now so much treated water that some Israeli engineers assert that “today, no one in Israel experiences

References:

13 According to the UNEP, domestic water use includes bathing, cooking, drinking, washing clothes and other household functions. See UNEP, “State of Environment and Outlook Report for the occupied Palestinian territory 2020”, p. 68.

14 Palestinian Water Authority, Water Status Report June 2019.

15 United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), “State of Environment and Outlook Report for the occupied Palestinian territory 2020”, p. 66.

16 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967*, A/HRC/40/73,15 March 2019, para. 53.

17 UNICEF, “UNICEF seawater desalination plant helps head off Gaza water crisis,” 6 April 2017, at: https://www.unicef.org/stories/unicef-seawater-desalination-plant-helps-head-gaza-water-crisis

18 UN OCHA, “Humanitarian Needs Overview,” 2018, at: https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/sites/www.humanitarianresponse.info/files/documents/files/hno_20_12_2017_final.pdf.

19 See “The human rights dimensions of population transfer, including the implantation of settlers,” E/CN.4/Sub.2/1993/17, 6 July 1993, at: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G93/142/08/PDF/G9314208.pdf?OpenElement.

20 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World, 2006).

21 Janet L. Abu Lughod, “The Demographic Transformation of Palestine,” in Ibrahiom Abu Lughod, ed., The Transformation of Palestine (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2971).

22 Beryl Cheal, “Refugees in the Gaza Strip, December 1948–May 1950,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, Special Issue: Palestine 1948 (autumn, 1988), pp. 138–57, at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2537600?seq=1.

23 Anthony Coon et al., The Goldberg Opportunity: A Chance for Human Rights-based Statecraft in Israel (Cairo: HIC-HLRN, 2010), at: http://www.hlrn.org/img/publications/Naqab FFM report 2010.zip.

24 Anders Jägerskog and David Phillips, “Managing trans-boundary waters for human development,” World Bank, January 2006, at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43244516_Managing_trans_-_boundary_waters_for_human_development.

Sustainable Management of the West Bank and Gaza Aquifers (SUSMAQ), published in UNDP, Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (New York: UNDP, 2006), p. 217, at: http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/267/hdr06-complete.pdf.

25 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), General Comment No. 15 (2002): The right to water (Articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), E/C.12/2002/11, 20 January 2003, at: https://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/water/docs/CESCR_GC_15.pdf.

26 Guy Howard and Jamie Bartram, “Domestic Water Quantity, Service Level and Health,” WHO/SDE/WSH/03.02 (Geneva: WHO, 2003), Table S1, at: https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases/WSH03.02.pdf?ua=1.

27 Jewish Telegraph Agency, “Sinking Kinneret to get infusion of desalinated water,” The Jerusalem Post (19 December 2017), at: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Sinking-Kinneret-to-get-infusion-of-desalinated-water-518501. 2018http://mideastenvironment.apps01.yorku.ca/2018/01/sinking-kinneret-to-get-infusion-of-desalinated-water-jerusalem-post/.

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