Gaza's other crisis—not enough clean drinking water

Mint

a day ago

In Gaza, the problem isn't just the daily struggle to find food. It is also finding enough clean water to drink.
Most of the enclave's water facilities have been damaged or destroyed in nearly two years of war. Residents trek long distances and queue for hours to fill up jerrycans with groundwater from wells for washing and with desalinated water distributed by water trucks for drinking. Families ration how much water they drink and sometimes drink the groundwater, even though it is often contaminated by seawater or sewage.
It is common for people to go days without washing themselves. Some have resorted to using seawater. Soap is a rare commodity, with infectious diseases spreading rapidly.
'We drink one cup of water a day," said Iman Masri, a mother of four, who is currently sharing a tent with 24 family members on land owned by her family near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Her family gets most of its drinking water from a water truck that comes by the camp roughly every other day. Their washing water comes from a nearby well. The dishes often pile up and the bathroom becomes unusable. Taking a shower is a luxury, and the family gets rashes from the lack of hygiene, she says.
'Sometimes when the trucks don't come, we drink water from the well," said Masri, who said the water is making them sick. 'My kids get diarrhea."
Residents of Gaza are currently using far less water than the World Health Organization's emergency standard of 15 liters of water per person a day on average for drinking and washing—with people in some areas using as little as two liters a day. Israel has taken steps to allow more food and better water access as international criticism grows.
More aid trucks are coming in, and Israel recently said it would reconnect Gaza's main desalination plant to its electricity grid, four months after it cut it off as a way to pressure Hamas. Israel also turned a water pipeline back on from Israel to northern Gaza earlier this month.
Residents and humanitarian workers say a lot more needs to be done faster to address the crisis.
The enclave relied on three sources of water before the war: groundwater wells, seawater desalination plants and water pipelines from Israel. All have been severely affected by the war, which began after Hamas's deadly attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel has imposed restrictions on imports of fuel, spare parts and other supplies. Three water pipelines from Israel, which used to supply around 13% of Gaza's water before the war, have worked only sporadically since the start of the war because of frequent damage. The wells and desalination plants have either been damaged, lack spare parts and chemicals to treat the water or are located in areas where the Israeli military has told people to leave.
Fuel and electricity—for water-delivery trucks, to run the well pumps and to power the actual plants—is in critically short supply, while some 255 of the 392 water wells are either inoperable or out of reach, according to Unicef, the United Nations children's agency. Unicef and other aid groups supply the water needs for the equivalent of 1.4 million people a day in Gaza, which has a population of 2.1 million.
The amount of water extracted from wells fell by 70% from levels pumped out during a cease-fire period earlier this year, because there isn't enough fuel to run the pumps.
'It is mostly used for cleaning, but people are now resorting to that water for cooking and drinking," said Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for Unicef who was recently in Gaza. 'People are washing in the sea."
Depending on the area, drinking water is sometimes available free or for a modest sum. Some well owners share their groundwater at no cost, but not all do. Filling a 600-gallon tank with nondrinking water costs the equivalent of $300, said Raneem Junina, a resident of Gaza City.
To ease the water shortage, the United Arab Emirates is funding the construction of new, 4-mile water pipelines that will link desalination plants on the Egyptian side of the border to the area of Al Mawasi in southern Gaza, a major population center, with the goal of meeting the water needs of around 600,000 people a day, according to the Emirati state-run news agency WAM. The project is being developed in coordination with Egyptian and Gaza authorities, it said.
But that will take time to complete, and Gaza's already dire humanitarian situation has worsened significantly since the end of a cease-fire in March. With rising hunger-related deaths and food insecurity, experts say the enclave is sliding into famine.
The crisis was precipitated by Israel's decision to ban all food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip from March to May, as a way to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages and to prevent aid from falling into the hands of the group, Israeli officials said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel has no starvation policy for Gaza.
Supplies stockpiled during the cease-fire gradually ran out. Access to clean water became much harder, with soap too becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of.
'Here in Gaza, we suffer from many things, but the most important thing is the water crisis," said Balsam Khalaf, a widow who lives in Gaza City with her daughter. 'A person can endure a little hunger. But water, we can't survive without it."
Khalaf says she spends hours every day queuing in the summer heat for water that rarely lasts more than half a day. One of her most prized possessions is a bottle of shampoo. She said a single bottle can sell for as much as $100 in the city's market, if it can be found at all.
Write to Margherita Stancati at [e-mail]