Palestinians struggle to find water as clean sources become increasingly scarce in Gaza
Many now have to walk, sometimes for miles, to get a small water fill after the Israeli military's bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza City's eastern Shejaia neighbourhood, in the north of the Strip, damaged the pipeline operated by state-owned Mekorot.
'Since morning, I have been waiting for water,' said 42-year-old Gaza woman Faten Nassar. 'There are no stations and no trucks coming. There is no water. The crossings are closed. God willing, the war will end safely and peacefully.'
Israel's military said in a statement it was in contact with the relevant organizations to coordinate the repair of what it called a malfunction of the northern pipeline as soon as possible.
It said a second pipeline supplying southern Gaza was still operating, adding that the water supply system 'is based on various water sources, including wells and local desalination facilities distributed throughout the Gaza Strip'.
Israel ordered Shejaia residents to evacuate last week as it launched an offensive that has seen several districts bombed. The military has said previously it was operating against 'terror infrastructure' and had killed a senior militant leader.
The northern pipeline had been supplying 70% of Gaza City's water since the destruction of most of its wells during the war, municipal authorities say.
'The situation is very difficult and things are getting more complicated, especially when it comes to people's daily lives and their daily water needs, whether for cleaning, disinfecting, and even cooking and drinking,' said Husni Mhana, the municipality's spokesperson.
'We are now living in a real thirst crisis in Gaza City, and we could face a difficult reality in the coming days if the situation remains the same.'
Most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have become internally displaced by the war, with many making daily trips on foot to fill plastic containers with water from the few wells still functioning in remoter areas — and even these do not guarantee clean supplies.
Water for drinking, cooking and washing has increasingly become a luxury for Gaza residents following the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose fighters carried out the deadliest attack in decades on Israel in October 2023, killing 1,200 people in southern Israel and taking some 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, more than 50,800 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military campaign, Palestinian authorities have said.
Many residents across the enclave queue for hours to get one water fill, which usually is not enough for their daily needs.
'I walk long distances. I get tired. I am old, I'm not young to walk around every day to get water,' said 64-year-old Adel Al-Hourani.
The Gaza Strip's only natural source of water is the Coastal Aquifer Basin, which runs along the eastern Mediterranean coast from the northern Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, through Gaza and into Israel.
But its salty tap water is severely depleted, with up to 97% deemed unfit for human consumption due to salinity, over-extraction and pollution.
The Palestinian Water Authority stated that most of its wells had been rendered inoperable during the war.
On March 22, a joint statement by the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics and the Water Authority said more than 85% of water and sanitation facilities and assets in Gaza were completely or partially out of service.
Palestinian and United Nations officials said most of Gaza's desalination plants were either damaged or had stopped operations because of Israel's power and fuel cuts.
'Due to the extensive damage incurred by the water and sanitation sector, water supply rates have declined to an average of 3-5 litres per person per day,' the statement said.
That was far below the minimum 15 litres per person per day requirement for survival in emergencies, according to the World Health Organization indicators, it added.
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The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
From dawn to dusk, a Gaza family focuses on one thing: finding food
Every morning, Abeer and Fadi Sobh wake up in their tent in the Gaza Strip to the same question: How will they find food for themselves and their six young children? The couple has three options: Maybe a charity kitchen will be open and they can get a pot of watery lentils. Or they can try jostling through crowds to get some flour from a passing aid truck. The last resort is begging. If those all fail, they simply don't eat. It happens more and more these days, as hunger saps their energy, strength and hope. The predicament of the Sobhs, who live in a seaside refugee camp west of Gaza City after being displaced multiple times, is the same for families throughout the war-ravaged territory. Hunger has grown throughout the past 22 months of war because of aid restrictions, humanitarian workers say. But food experts warned earlier this week the 'worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza.' Israel enforced a complete blockade on food and other supplies for 2½ months beginning in March. It said its objective was to increase pressure on Hamas to release dozens of hostages it has held since its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Though the flow of aid resumed in May, the amount is a fraction of what aid organizations say is needed. A breakdown of law and order has also made it nearly impossible to safely deliver food. Much of the aid that does get in is hoarded or sold in markets at exorbitant prices. Here is a look at a day in the life of the Sobh family: A morning seawater bath The family wakes up in their tent, which Fadi Sobh, a 30-year-old street vendor, says is unbearably hot in the summer. With fresh water hard to come by, his wife Abeer, 29, fetches water from the sea. One by one, the children stand in a metal basin and scrub themselves as their mother pours the saltwater over their heads. Nine-month-old Hala cries as it stings her eyes. The other children are more stoic. Abeer then rolls up the bedding and sweeps the dust and sand from the tent floor. With no food left over from the day before, she heads out to beg for something for her family's breakfast. Sometimes, neighbors or passersby give her lentils. Sometimes she gets nothing. Abeer gives Hala water from a baby bottle. When she's lucky, she has lentils that she grinds into powder to mix into the water. 'One day feels like 100 days, because of the summer heat, hunger and the distress,' she said. A trip to the soup kitchen Fadi heads to a nearby soup kitchen. Sometimes one of the children goes with him. 'But food is rarely available there,' he said. The kitchen opens roughly once a week and never has enough for the crowds. Most often, he said, he waits all day but returns to his family with nothing 'and the kids sleep hungry, without eating.' Fadi used to go to an area in northern Gaza where aid trucks arrive from Israel. There, giant crowds of equally desperate people swarm over the trucks and strip away the cargo of food. Often, Israeli troops nearby open fire, witnesses say. Israel says it only fires warning shots, and others in the crowd often have knives or pistols to steal boxes. Fadi, who also has epilepsy, was shot in the leg last month. That has weakened him too much to scramble for the trucks, so he's left with trying the kitchens. Meanwhile, Abeer and her three eldest children — 10-year-old Youssef, 9-year-old Mohammed and 7-year-old Malak — head out with plastic jerrycans to fill up from a truck that brings freshwater from central Gaza's desalination plant. The kids struggle with the heavy jerrycans. Youssef loads one onto his back, while Mohammed half-drags his, his little body bent sideways as he tries to keep it out of the dust of the street. A scramble for aid Abeer sometimes heads to Zikim herself, alone or with Youssef. Most in the crowds are men — faster and stronger than she is. 'Sometimes I manage to get food, and in many cases, I return empty-handed,' she said. If she's unsuccessful, she appeals to the sense of charity of those who succeeded. 'You survived death thanks to God, please give me anything,' she tells them. Many answer her plea, and she gets a small bag of flour to bake for the children, she said. She and her son have become familiar faces. One man who regularly waits for the trucks, Youssef Abu Saleh, said he often sees Abeer struggling to grab food, so he gives her some of his. 'They're poor people and her husband is sick,' he said. 'We're all hungry and we all need to eat.' During the hottest part of the day, the six children stay in or around the tent. Their parents prefer the children sleep during the heat — it stops them from running around, using up energy and getting hungry and thirsty. Foraging and begging in the afternoon As the heat eases, the children head out. Sometimes Abeer sends them to beg for food from their neighbors. Otherwise, they scour Gaza's bombed-out streets, foraging through the rubble and trash for anything to fuel the family's makeshift stove. They've become good at recognizing what might burn. Scraps of paper or wood are best, but hardest to find. The bar is low: plastic bottles, plastic bags, an old shoe — anything will do. One of the boys came across a pot in the trash one day — it's what Abeer now uses to cook. The family has been displaced so many times, they have few belongings left. 'I have to manage to get by,' Abeer said. 'What can I do? We are eight people.' If they're lucky, lentil stew for dinner After a day spent searching for the absolute basics to sustain life — food, water, fuel to cook — the family sometimes has enough of all three for Abeer to make a meal. Usually it's a thin lentil soup. But often there is nothing, and they all go to bed hungry. Abeer said she's grown weak and often feels dizzy when she's out searching for food or water. 'I am tired. I am no longer able,' she said. 'If the war goes on, I am thinking of taking my life. I no longer have any strength or power.' ___
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza
The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside. Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later. Cogat, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food. Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day. As Gaza has slid into famine this summer, Israeli officials have variously denied the existence of mass starvation, claimed without evidence that Hamas steals and hoards aid, or blamed hunger on UN distribution failures, sharing pictures of aid pallets awaiting collection inside the border. They pointed to deadly and chaotic food distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed logistics startup, as proof that Palestinians had access to food. Yet data compiled and published by Israel's own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, Cogat records show, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period. Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat. A 'worst-case scenario' famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. Food deliveries are 'at a scale far below what is needed', amid 'drastic restrictions on the entry of supplies', the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report citing Israeli figures on aid. The Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts that scrutinises IPC alerts, said food shipments 'have been highly inadequate', and singled out the GHF. 'Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported,' the FRC said. In March and April Gaza was under total siege, with no food entering. In mid-May Netanyahu said shipments would restart because of international pressure over a 'starvation crisis'. Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows. However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza's descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get 'every ounce of food' to starving children. In response Netanyahu has promised only 'minimal' extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine. Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly. Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them. In the first 21 months of war, 104 flights supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one. They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy. Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons. Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B'tselem described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation. Israel's government knows how much food Gaza's people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation. The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza
The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside. Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later. Cogat, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food. Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day. As Gaza has slid into famine this summer, Israeli officials have variously denied the existence of mass starvation, claimed without evidence that Hamas steals and hoards aid, or blamed hunger on UN distribution failures, sharing pictures of aid pallets awaiting collection inside the border. They pointed to deadly and chaotic food distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed logistics startup, as proof that Palestinians had access to food. Yet data complied and published by Israel's own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, Cogat records show, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period. Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat. A 'worst-case scenario' famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. Food deliveries are 'at a scale far below what is needed', amid 'drastic restrictions on the entry of supplies', the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report citing Israeli figures on aid. The Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts that scrutinises IPC alerts, said food shipments 'have been highly inadequate', and singled out the GHF. 'Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported,' the FRC said. In March and April Gaza was under total siege, with no food entering. In mid-May Netanyahu said shipments would restart because of international pressure over a 'starvation crisis'. Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows. However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza's descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get 'every ounce of food' to starving children. In response Netanyahu has promised only 'minimal' extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine. Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly. Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them. In the first 21 months of war, 104 flights supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one. They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy. Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons. Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B'tselem described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation. Israel's government knows how much food Gaza's people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation. The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.
