Palestine

Water before the Mandate

In Battir, south-west of Jerusalem, villagers carried spring water through stone channels and divided irrigation time among families. This was not an empty landscape awaiting a water plan. Farmers maintained terraces, planted crops and negotiated the use of the spring long before Britain governed Palestine.

British armies enter Palestine

During the First World War, British forces occupied Jerusalem. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration announced British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, while referring to the rights of existing non-Jewish communities. The people living beside Palestine’s springs and fields did not choose the terms of that declaration.

A river discussed in London

On 7 November 1921, the British government told Parliament it had agreed in principle to give Pinhas Rutenberg a concession to use the Jordan and Yarmouk waters to generate electricity. The decision was debated in London during British rule in Palestine. It tied the river to a new administration of land, energy and political authority.

Fields left behind

In 1948, Zionist militias and then Israeli forces expelled Palestinians from homes and villages, while fighting and fear drove others to flee. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes. Families lost houses, farmland, wells and connections to village springs. Those losses were not only about land ownership: irrigation channels and olive groves were bound to family livelihoods.

A farm near Jericho

In 1949, Musa Alami’s Arab Development Society sought to build an agricultural settlement and training project near Jericho for Palestinian refugees. A July UN report described a Transjordanian approval for land, but also saline soils and groundwater that was difficult to reach. Workers continued the project, and a vocational training centre opened in 1952.

An occupation reaches the headwaters

During the June 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights, among other territories. Access to Jordan basin waters and to West Bank groundwater became bound up with Israeli military administration and later legal restrictions on Palestinian water infrastructure.

What approval means

The 1995 Israeli–Palestinian Interim Agreement created a Joint Water Committee with consensus decision-making over specified water projects. In Area C, additional Israeli Civil Administration permits were required. Years later the World Bank described how approval and access restrictions hindered Palestinian water investments.

Where the water cannot be built

A World Bank review found that Palestinian utilities and communities faced problems building and maintaining networks under fragmented jurisdiction and control over permits, land and movement. That translated into delayed projects and unequal reliability for households. Development finance could pay for equipment and pipes, but it could not by itself remove the territorial authority that determined where Palestinians could build and repair them. The crisis was political as well as technical: investment and control were not the same thing.

Gaza: an Israeli military campaign devastates water and sanitation

Gaza’s water crisis did not begin in October 2023. Families displaced during the 1948 Nakba sought refuge in Gaza. Israel occupied the territory in 1967, and its blockade from 2007 restricted people’s movement and the entry of materials needed to build and repair water and sanitation infrastructure. UN humanitarian assessments documented these constraints and the deterioration of water services long before the latest war.

In 2014, years before the latest war, UNICEF reported that more than four in five Gaza residents bought drinking water from unregulated private vendors. Some families paid as much as a third of their income for water. Publicly supported desalination brought relief to some neighbourhoods, but plants needed electricity and fuel, both constrained by closure and restrictions. An unsafe aquifer, restricted infrastructure and households forced into expensive private purchases were already part of the political economy of Gaza’s water.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel, killing civilians and taking hostages. Israel then launched an extensive military campaign in Gaza. Israeli bombardment and ground operations devastated civilian infrastructure, while Israeli restrictions on fuel and supplies impeded water production and repairs. Israeli attacks and restrictions left families relying on tankers, damaged wells and improvised sanitation. UNICEF reported in July 2026 that nearly 90 per cent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed. Palestinian technicians continued trying to keep the remaining systems working.

The people repairing the system

At Gaza City’s Al Manshia desalination plant, Omar Shatat and colleagues at the Palestinian Coastal Municipal Water Utility, working with ICRC engineer Husam Al Nunu, repaired machinery, constructed two storage tanks and a borehole, and established a water-truck filling point. The ICRC reported in June 2026 that the restored site produced 40,000 litres of water per hour and served about 30,000 people. Omar described their work as protecting residents’ dignity. He also documented the shortages of electricity, fuel, oil and replacement parts that kept Palestinian technical capacity from becoming secure public access to water.