Parched: Israel’s policy of water deprivation in the West Bank
Executive summary, May 2023
- Israelis, including those living in settlements, use an average of 247 liters of water a day per person – three times the quantity used by Palestinians in the West Bank, which amounts to 82.4 liters a person. In Palestinian communities that are not hooked up to the water grid, average daily water consumption is a mere 26 liters per person, much like the average in disaster zones.
- 92% of Palestinians in the West Bank store water in tanks on their rooftops to counter the chronic water shortage.
- In total, Israelis consumed 10 times the amount of water consumed by Palestinians in the West Bank in 2020 – although the Israeli population is only three times larger.
The Israeli apartheid regime works to promote and perpetuate Jewish supremacy in the entire area it controls from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, through land and immigration policies, movement restrictions and – as this report shows – management of water resources. Within this single water sector, the regime deliberately creates a huge disparity in consumption. One group enjoys the luxuries afforded by a first-world water superpower, its lifestyle effectively impervious to weather conditions and climate change. The other – Palestinian subjects – suffers a chronic water crisis that stands to grow along with climate change.
This policy clearly demonstrates the profound dehumanization Palestinians have undergone in Israeli society – a process that has enabled Israel to use the most basic of resources as a means of control and achieving political goals, even at the cost of keeping millions of people thirsty. This dehumanization also enables the systemic, cruel campaign to deprive the most vulnerable Palestinian communities in the hottest, most arid parts of the West Bank of their water sources, even in the blistering heat of summer, so Israel can rob them of what little possessions and land they have left and take over as much territory as possible, all in order to continue its settlement project and the dispossession of Palestinians.
These figures indicate a severe water crisis among Palestinians in the West Bank. The shortage is not the result of fate or of a natural disaster, nor is it part of an unavoidable regional water crisis. Instead, it is an intentional outcome of Israel’s deliberately discriminatory policy, which views water as another means for controlling the Palestinian population in the West Bank.
Israel justifies this policy by citing the arrangements laid out in the Interim Agreement it signed with the PLO in 1995. However, that agreement was supposed to be in effect for five years only, and its provisions in no way reflect current reality in the West Bank. First, since 1995, the Palestinian population has grown by about 75%, yet the amount of water Israel allows the Palestinians to extract remain the same. To make up for the shortage, the Palestinian Authority is forced to purchase water from the national Israeli water company, Mekorot, at several times the cost. In total, Palestinians in the West Bank consumed 239 million cubic meters (mcm) of water in 2020, 77.1 of them purchased from Israel and then distributed unequally throughout the West Bank.
Second, the agreement did not foresee Israel’s transformation into a water superpower. Smart planning, massive investment and technological developments have enabled Israel to build an advanced, efficient water management system that is relatively impervious to the effects of droughts and climate change. This system is designed to meet the needs of the population until 2050, at least. As a result, citizens of Israel, whether they live in its sovereign territory or in West Bank settlements, enjoy an almost unlimited supply of water for domestic and public consumption, as well as water-intensive agriculture, including in desert areas. Thanks to this revolution, Israel no longer depends on natural water resources and annually produces more than twice the average amount of water that can be extracted from them. Given this new reality, it would be reasonable to expect that Israel allow the Palestinians in the West Bank to pump much larger quantities than those stipulated in the agreement, with no effect on Israeli water consumption.
However, Israel acts as if has exclusive rights over all water sources in the territory between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and sole decision-making power over how to use them. Immediately after occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel took over the Palestinian water sector and introduced sweeping bans and restrictions. It demanded the Palestinians obtain its approval to drill new wells, and used the new access gained to water sources, especially in the Jordan Valley, for its own ends. Israel connected all the settlements built in the West Bank, with the exception of the Jordan Valley, to the Israeli water grid. Water is supplied to settlements based on consumption indicators inside Israel, and the water supply for Israeli communities on both sides of the Green Line is managed as a single system. The Water Agreement entrenched Israel’s monopoly over water sources and cement its status as regulator and sole authority for strategic decisions concerning water. It enshrined the discriminatory distribution of shared water sources among Israel and the Palestinians, preserving the principle followed before it was signed: Israelis have access to water on demand, while Palestinians receive water according to predetermined allocations.
This agreement ignored the reality of occupation and the power relations between Israel and the Palestinians. It created the illusion of two equal water sectors between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – one Israeli and the other Palestinian – that share water sources, run joint monitoring mechanisms and make decisions together. Yet the two sides are not equal: Israel is an occupying power in the West Bank, controlling Palestinian subjects who have not elected it and cannot influence the institutions that govern their lives.
Moreover, clauses addressing the distribution of water completely ignore the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C in other articles of the Interim Agreement. Israel retained all powers in Area C, which covers about 60% of the West Bank, and Palestinians need its consent – given sparingly – for virtually anything: every new drilling, every water grid that connects neighboring Palestinian communities, and every wastewater treatment facility, which inevitably have to be built far from residential neighborhoods, must pass through Area C. This policy has led to sharp differences in daily per capita water consumption among Palestinian communities. While the agreement allows Israel to export water from inside the country to West Bank settlements, it precludes the Palestinian Authority from transporting water from one part of the West Bank to another. This creates an absurd situation, as the Palestinian Water Authority produces water at a negligible cost in the Qalqiliyah, Tulkarm and Jericho Districts but cannot deliver it to other Palestinian communities, sometimes mere miles away, due to Israel’s refusal. The resulting discrepancies in water consumption among the various Palestinian districts are staggering: in 2020, daily per capita water consumption in Bethlehem and Hebron Districts was 51 liters, while in Qalqiliyah District it was almost three times greater – 141 liters.
Israel cites the agreement as justification for its water policy, claiming the Palestinians signed it. However, the provisions concerning the Palestinians are not carried out:
- The Palestinians have yet to receive the promised additional supply from shared water sources, most of which was to originate in the Eastern Aquifer. Israel seized control of the most productive outlets there and most of the remaining parts lie within Area C, where Israel limits Palestinian access. Also, hydrological surveys conducted by Israel in the late 1990s revealed that the unutilized water in this sub-aquifer is not potable due to high salinity. This was likely the main reason Israel did not drill there itself. This means that even in the few cases in which Israel did allow the Palestinians to drill in the Eastern Aquifer, the drillings were deep and expensive, and the extracted water required costly desalination. Ultimately, the cost of production and the distance from the water grid did not justify utilizing these wells.
- Over the years, Israel has turned the Joint Water Committee established in the agreement into an instrument for promoting its own interests, after emptying the Palestinians’ veto power of meaning. It dictated that projects intended for Palestinians be discussed together with projects intended for settlements as a “package deal,” thereby obliging the Palestinians to support settlement expansion. It also required that any project designed to serve Palestinians that crosses through Area C in whole or in part – as most Palestinian projects do – must receive approval from the Civil Administration Supreme Planning Committee, in which Palestinians have no representation.
- The equal supervision mechanism stipulated in the Interim Agreement was never implemented. The Palestinians were not given access to the municipal territories of the settlements, and the agreement never gave them access to projects within the Green Line in the first place, even though these projects use shared water sources. Israel operates with no external controls and the Palestinians have no power to deal with settlers and soldiers who damage water cisterns and water sources, or with unauthorized water connections. Israel, meanwhile, has supervision powers over the Palestinians, which it uses, among other things, to damage water sources serving Palestinian shepherding communities.
