Water Apartheid

 By Micki Luckey

Can you imagine living on 2-3 liters (roughly 2-3 quarts) of water a day?  That was the average water consumed daily by a person living in Gaza before they were hit by even worse conditions under the on-going Israeli bombardments.  During its 75 year long occupation of Palestine, Israel has used many different strategies to force the Palestinians from their land. Controlling the water supply throughout the area has been one specific and effective weapon Israel continues to use to bolster its own development and to displace Palestinians.

Before October 7th, 2023, Gazans were spending a third of their income on water and regularly mixed the water from the tap with sea water to make it go farther.  The lack of clean drinking water had already made 25% of children in Gaza susceptible to gastric ailments and other diseases.  As part of their retaliation for October 7, Israeli forces increased their targeting of the water infrastructure in Gaza.  By November 2023 Israeli attacks had disrupted the sources (desalination plants, pipelines and wells) of all but 5% of Gaza’s water.   So now Gazans face “heightened health and environmental risks owing to limited access to clean water.”

Today people in Gaza are forced to drink polluted seawater.

This booth appeared at a 2024 Palestinian solidarity gathering. A person wearing a Netanyahu mask was promoting GAZA SPRINGS Sewage and Seawater with the ad, “A Taste of Genocide”. https://gazasprings.com/ photo by author.

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