By denying Palestinians safe water, Israel has created an unparalleled health crisis and risks causing irreversible ecological damage.

Denying water to Gaza has been a key tactic of the war from the very beginning, with Israel shutting off the pipes supplying the enclave on October 7. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

At the end of October, an internal U.S. State Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink a potentially lethal mix of water polluted with sewage and salt from the sea. Since then, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been severely weakened by rampant hunger and disease, as well as the physical wounds inflicted on nearly 60,000 people and the mental stress of ceaseless bombardment that has taken more than 23,500 lives. All of this renders Palestinians in Gaza even more vulnerable to water-borne illnesses.

By the end of December, as WHO reported, the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in the southern city of Rafah had access to, on average, one toilet for every 486 people, while across Gaza one shower served an average of 4,500 people. Sewage flows through the streets and contaminates the hastily erected tents in which hundreds of thousands of people now live throughout southern and central Gaza. Those who are menstruating face intense hardship, with menstrual products, toilets, and water all in direly short supply. 

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    315·
    10 months ago

    What? This is a continuation of a long-standing Israeli policy

    The deprivation of water and the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure have long been part of the Israeli effort, in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, “to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population,” as a UN Fact Finding Mission stated in 2009.

    Past Israeli military operations in both of these occupied territories have also led to the destruction of water resources. And for decades, Israel has used water grabbing to dispossess Palestinians of their land and ways of life — impeding Palestinian agriculture in the West Bank and for Palestinians inside Israel. But Israel’s weaponization of water within the framework of its current offensive on the Gaza Strip is on an entirely different scale, with the capacity to cause an unparalleled public health crisis and irreversible ecological damage.

    • sin_free_for_00_daysEnglish
      620·
      10 months ago

      Israel are assholes and the international community should have come along a long fucking time ago to address the bullshit settlement stuff. Absolute bellends. But you know, my god is better than yours, so fuck right off, amiright?

      • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        295·
        10 months ago

        There are certainly religious aspects, but this is first and foremost a settler colonialist land grab Totally agree with the rest of your statement tho

        “…the takeover of the West Bank in particular, with its ancient biblical sights, was a Zionist aim even before 1948 and it fitted the logic of the Zionist project as a whole. This logic can be summarized as the wish to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible… After the occupation, the new ruler confined the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in an impossible limbo: they were neither refugees nor citizens—they were, and still are, citizenless inhabitants. They were inmates, and in many respects still are, of a huge prison in which they have no civil, and human rights and no impact on their future. The world tolerates this situation because Israel claims —and the claim was never challenged until recently—that the situation is temporary…Israel is still incarcerating a third generation of Palestinians…and depicting these mega-prisons as temporary…”

        • Municipal0379@lemmy.worldEnglish
          325·
          10 months ago

          Lolololololol. I’m definitely left of center and even I know “colonialist land grab” is bs. Israel has plenty of problems. Calling this a “colonialist land grab” isn’t on their list of fuck ups.

          • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.worldEnglish
            163·
            10 months ago

            If you can’t see how Zionist Israel’s ethnic cleansing is motivated by white settler colonialism then your lefty card is probably just a cardboard circle from all the corners you’ve cut off it.