Gaza’s water “comes from wells with salt water unfit for consumption. They have water treatment plants, Israel should hit those plants. When the entire world says we have gone insane and this is a humanitarian disaster — we will say, it’s not an end, it’s a means.” That was the opinion of Giora Eiland, adviser to the defense minister and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, writing in Yedioth Ahronoth on October 9, 2023.⁠[1]

Already by November, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that “around 70% of the population in Gaza is drinking salinised and contaminated water.”⁠[2] By July 2024, Oxfam reported that “people in Gaza have had only 4.74 litres of water per person per day” since the start of Israel’s offensive,[3] well below the World Health Organization’s minimum needed for survival in a humanitarian emergency.⁠[4]

Israel's control over life’s most essential resource did not arise overnight. After occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, it quickly established a system to extract water for its own use while restricting Palestinian access. For decades, this policy forced the indigenous population into dependence and precarity, while Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories — illegal under international law⁠[5] — enjoyed “privileged access to water.”⁠[6]

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