water

A deepening drought in the Middle East is aggravating a dispute over water resources after the World Bank found that Israel is taking four times as much water as the Palestinians from a vital shared aquifer.

The region faces a fifth consecutive year of drought this summer, but the World Bank report found huge disparities in water use between Israelis and Palestinians, although both share the mountain aquifer that runs the length of the occupied West Bank. Palestinians have access to only a fifth of the water supply, while Israel, which controls the area, takes the rest, the bank said.

Israelis use 240 cubic metres of water a person each year, against 75 cubic metres for West Bank Palestinians and 125 for Gazans, the bank said. Increasingly, West Bank Palestinians must rely on water bought from the Israeli national water company, Mekorot.

In some areas of the West Bank, Palestinians are surviving on as little as 10 to 15 litres a person each day, which is at or below humanitarian disaster response levels recommended to avoid epidemics. In Gaza, where Palestinians rely on an aquifer that has become increasingly saline and polluted, the situation is worse. Only 5%-10% of the available water is clean enough to drink.

The World Bank report, published last month, provoked sharp criticism from Israel, which disputed the figures and the scale of the problem on the Palestinian side. But others have welcomed the study and its findings.

read more at the independent

Six months after the war in Gaza, humanitarian workers claim the population there is sliding deeper into despair.

The territory's 1.5 million people are still struggling to rebuild their lives, because of stringent restrictions on the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza.

"Gaza neighbourhoods particularly hard hit by the Israeli strikes will continue to look like the epicentre of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory for reconstruction," the Red Cross said in a report.

Red Cross's spokeswoman in Jerusalem, Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, says they see seriously ill patients who cannot get out of Gaza to get the specialised treatment that they need.

Israel is denying Palestinians access to even the basic minimum of clean, safe water, Amnesty International says.

In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restrictions discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

It says that in Gaza, Israel's blockade has brought the water and sewage system to "crisis point".

Israel says the report is flawed and the Palestinians get more water than was agreed under the 1990s peace deal.

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We now have even more proof, yet another smoking gun: Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza.

WikiLeaks reveals that “Israel told US officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza's economy ‘on the brink of collapse’ while avoiding a humanitarian crisis”.

As Ha’aretz notes: “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge,” one of the cables read.

In an unsurprising continuation of the story, it notes prime minister Ehud Olmert had publicly explained this policy in January 2008: "We will not harm the supply of food for children, medicine for those who need it and fuel for institutions that save lives... But there is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards (at southern Israel)”. Similar quotes could have been found.

While ignoring the continuation of the blockade even when no rockets have been fired, these euphemisms do not quite capture the reality of a conscious policy of devastating an entire society, and keeping it “on the brink of collapse”. They cannot adequately capture what leading a less than “normal” life entails for 1.5 million people subject to Israel’s siege for years. As a brief snapshot, I previously noted that some 66 per cent of babies have anaemia, as do 35 per cent of pregnant women in Gaza. This cannot capture what the destruction of an entire economy does to the dignity of a people, as Richard Goldstone noted. Eighty per cent of Gazans have been reduced to dependence on food aid. And that is to say, the food aid Israel allows into Gaza: restricted both in quality and quantity. It is true children are not starving to death. There is no “humanitarian crisis”. Their growth is merely being stunted. Babies are getting respiratory and intestinal problems because of the polluted water they are forced to drink - 90 per cent of Gaza’s water is “not suitable for drinking”, and will continue to be so whilst Israel refuses to allow in the “vital water equipment” Gaza so desperately needs.

As I noted at the time of the flotilla, there was plenty of evidence on the public record that indicated this was conscious Israeli policy. This was why most Israelis didn’t believe the Israeli government’s later line that the blockade was to stop rockets.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/43156.html

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RAWABI, West Bank — The billion-dollar, five-year gamble to build a new middle-class Palestinian city on a West Bank mountaintop was just about to welcome its first residents when the Israeli government decided this month to withhold a basic necessity: running water.

Before granting water access to the planned city of Rawabi, Israel — which controls the area that the water pipe would run through — wants Palestinian Authority officials to return to an Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee. The Palestinians abandoned the group in 2010 because they don’t want to approve water projects to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are built on land that Palestinians want for a future state — and which still get plenty of water.

The man-made water crisis at Rawabi represents a blow to the middle-class Palestinian community, which hoped to enjoy the city’s outdoor mall, restaurants, boutiques, sports club, swimming pool, multiplex theater and school system, as soon as construction can be completed.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/new-palestinian-city-has-condos-a-mall-and-a-sports-club--but-no-water/2015/02/24/d5a28dcc-b92e-11e4-a200-c008a01a6692_story.html?hpid=z1

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While the money flowing to presidential candidates who offer unqualified support for Israel is finally receiving some media attention, much of what falls under the rubric of “The Israel Lobby” is more subtle. In much of the mainstream media, it consists of a nearly incessant effort to present Israel to Americans as both exemplary (in terms of morals or science) and completely normal (as if Palestinians do not and never did exist). A striking instance of the phenomenon was presented over the weekend in USA Today, the middle-of-the-road national paper which, to my limited knowledge, has not been a foremost exponent of Israel Lobby positions.

Over the weekend, it ran a piece, with illustrations, taking up the entire back page of the front section, entitled “Israel’s Guide to Water.” Michele Chabin, who seems to be the paper’s principal Israel correspondent, suggests that California might look towards the “Middle East”—that is, Israel—for a solution to its water difficulties. She then elaborates upon Israel’s decades of experience with managing scarce water resources, and the techniques and technologies that Israel has developed. She quotes an Israeli official, the former top water minister, who states reassuringly that “Israel no longer has a water shortage.” In a digression, she notes Israeli success in keeping pine trees alive in a dry climate, though not mentioning that the trees—”part of a man-made greenbelt”—are not indigenous to the region. The paper’s takeaway: brilliant Israelis, who make the desert bloom, can help solve California’s major problem.

No doubt much of what the article recounts is true. Israel’s utilization of water recycling and desalinization probably is state of the art, or close to it. California and other drought-affected areas might well learn something from Israeli engineers. But is this really the most salient aspect of the Israeli water story?

Last year, the president of the European Union, Martin Schulz, visited Israel and spoke before the Knesset. In a carefully phrased rhetorical aside, he asked whether it was true, as a Palestinian youth had told him, that an Israeli can use 70 liters of water daily and a Palestinian just 17. “I haven’t checked the data. I’m asking you if this is correct.” Schulz’s words caused an uproar. Members of the right-wing party Habayit Habehudi went ballistic, heckling Schulz and staging a walk-out. One of its members mounted the podium to give Schulz a Bible lesson. “The Holy One, blessed be He, gave Eretz Israel to the Jewish people.” Presumably the implication was that Israeli Jews have the right to all the water.

read more http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/palestines-man-made-drought/

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Israel and the Palestinian Authority have reached a water-sharing deal to bring relief to parched Palestinian communities, in a breakthrough announced during the latest visit to the region by the US Middle East envoy. 

The deal announced by Jason Greenblatt, the US Middle East representative, in Jerusalem on Wednesday would give Palestinian territories about a quarter of its annual water needs at a reduced rate. 

Israel's Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi and Mazin Ghunaim, head of the Palestinian Water Authority, were also present when the deal was announced.

Greenblatt said that with the deal, Israel would provide the West Bank and Gaza Strip with 32 million cubic metres, or 32.9 billion litres, of water annually in the immediate future.

read more:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/israel-palestinian-authority-reach...

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