Dehydration is now occurring, stated the WHO, as reported by The Guardian. Symptoms in people include dizziness, fatigue, and confusion. In severe cases, organ shutdown and brain damage occur. Fresh clean water is critical in a healthcare setting to prevent infections.
The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Tuesday that Gaza’s last seawater desalination plant had shut down, bringing the risk of further deaths and waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Six water wells, three water pumping stations and one water reservoir – which collectively served more than 1.1million people – are also out of action, it said.
Israel cut off its sole water pipeline to Gaza, along with the fuel and electricity that power water and sewage plants, in the wake of the Hamas attacks that killed 1,400 people. UN experts have condemned the Israeli bombardment and blockade as “collective punishment”, which is a war crime.
After 16 years of a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade, imposed after Hamas seized control of the exclave in 2007, clean water was already one of the most pressing concerns in the strip. Almost 97% of the water in Gaza’s sole aquifer is not potable; without proper maintenance and with Israeli restrictions on imports and electricity, sewage treatment plants were overwhelmed years ago. Untreated waste has flowed directly into the Mediterranean for more than a decade.
Now, desperate civilians find themselves consuming the contaminated tap water, or digging new wells too close to the sea to drink and use dirty, salty water. “People are trying to fetch water out of dangerous places, like the wells at mosques. In fact, children were killed [by airstrikes] while trying to drink water at a mosque a week ago,” said Jamil al-Meqdad, a writer and researcher in Gaza City.
No action has been taken yet for humanitarian aid to be delivered inside the strip from the Rafa gates in the Sinai. Logistics are still being discussed. Meanwhile, Gaza residents drink untreated water from wells too close to the Mediterranean Sea. Diarrhea and waterborne diseases are likely as a result.
Meanwhile, the role of climate change in Middle East tensions is fundamental to the violence. To prove the point, Climatologist Michael Mann wrote an opinion piece in The Hill about the last time climate change struck the Middle East, specifically Mesopotamia, and is eerily similar to today, including the crisis between Hamas and Israel and water. He also mentions Trump's wall at the border as an example of backlash against climate refugees from Central America.
The Middle East and North Africa are staring down a severe water crisis due to changing rainfall patterns and increasing heat, and there are just too many people exploiting groundwater and inefficient irrigation systems. We can also include Southern Europe as a transition to desert is underway due to global warming.
Having arisen 6,000 years ago in the Middle East, Mesopotamia was the first true civilization. It consisted of individual city-states with populations comparable to modern towns and small cities. They were separated from each other by canals or stone boundaries and connected by trade and commerce. These interconnected city-states arose, as it turns out, as a response to climate-driven environmental stress.
Agriculture had taken hold in the aptly named fertile crescent around 10,000 years ago when it was relatively lush and humid. But as the region became steadily drier over the ensuing millennia, driven by long-term changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun, it had become too dry for rain-fed agriculture 6,000 years ago.
Civilization afforded increased resilience, as irrigation could support farming even when rainfall became increasingly intermittent as the region continued to grow more arid. But resilience has its limits, as we learn from the fall of the Akkadian Empire around 4,200 years ago.
snip — agricultural collapse
The likely culprit was a massive volcanic eruption that cooled off and dried out the subtropics, including the Middle East, for a decade or more. The Akkadian Empire had become dependent on the productivity of the northern part of the empire. The agricultural surplus from the north was typically distributed to other regions and used to support a massive army. But the extended drought decimated agricultural productivity, as grimly reported in “The Curse of Akkad”: “The large arable tracts yielded no grain, the inundated fields yielded no fish, the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, the thick clouds did not rain.”
The agricultural collapse was followed by mass southward migration of the northern populations. The caravan met with opposition from the southern populations, including the construction of a 100-mile-long wall known as the “Repeller of the Amorites.” Stretching from the Tigris all the way to the Euphrates, it was built in a desperate effort to keep out immigrants as climate conditions deteriorated.
Israel and Palestine both share a risk of devastating impacts from global warming. Lack of water provides nations incentive for resource wars, per the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the example of water being weaponized since 1965—a brief excerpt on the history between Palestine and Israel with water as a weapon.
The climate outlook for Palestine is daunting, particularly when it comes to the potential impact on water resources. Under a high emissions scenario, the mean annual temperature in Palestine is set to rise by about 4.4 degrees Celsius on average by 2100, at the higher end of global predictions. An estimated 20 percent decline in rainfall in the eastern Mediterranean by 2050 would result in more frequent episodes of drought, directly impacting food systems and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities. Given its proximity (and the blurred boundaries between occupied state and occupying power), Israel stands to face similar challenges.
snip
Water competition has long been a source of conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The 1965 Palestinian attack on Israel’s water carrier that launched the Fatah movement aimed to prevent Israel’s diversion of the waters of the upper Jordan River. And among the Israeli objectives during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War was to take the hydro-strategic advantage from river riparians—states with rights in a watercourse because it is within their territory or along their borders—and control exploitation of the Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank. The Israeli military seized virtually all West Bank water, destroyed or confiscated irrigation pumps, prohibited Palestinian access to the Jordan River, barred the development of water infrastructure, and denied Palestinians permits to dig new wells.
Though Israel recognized Palestinian water rights in the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Oslo II), it did so only with respect to groundwater “in the West Bank,” referring to the Mountain Aquifer where Palestinians are upper riparians and have the advantage. The contours of Palestinian water rights in that aquifer and in the other two major water sources, the Coastal Aquifer (partially underlying Gaza and Egypt) and the Jordan River, were left for final status talks, which were supposed to be concluded by 1999. Drawing out negotiations for decades has allowed Israel to exploit transboundary waters without consideration for the needs of Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip or the West Bank, where the population has substantially increased since the Oslo II water allocations were set nearly a quarter of a century ago. The interim agreement essentially legitimized previous restrictions on Palestinian water exploitation, enabling Israel to seize 80 percent of the groundwater in the West Bank.
Mní wičhóni — Water is life.