22 March marks World Water Day, the annual awareness day established in 1993 by the United Nations (UN) to draw attention to water-related issues and to advocate for sustainable and rights-based water policies. This year’s theme is ‘Groundwater: making the invisible visible’, aimed at emphasizing the crucial impact of groundwater on drinking water supply.

Groundwater is found in aquifers underground and can be extracted to the surface by pumps and wells. Many areas of the world depend entirely on groundwater, which provides much of the water used for drinking, sanitation, food production, and industrial processes. This is the case in the occupied Gaza Strip, where 95.4 percent of water comes from groundwater, with the remainder coming from desalinated water (2.6 percent) or purchased from Israel's national water company Mekorot (2 percent).

In Gaza, the main source of groundwater is the coastal basin or aquifer. Already in 2012, a UN study warned that the aquifer could become unusable by 2017, with the damage irreversible by 2020. This deterioration is driven by a combination of factors, most notably Israel’s selective control and exploitation of Gaza's groundwater sources. The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation highlighted that “[d]espite enjoying alternative water resources, Israel is using 75 percent of the sustainable groundwater amount each year from the coastal aquifer, leaving little of it available for Gaza.”

Moreover, in the absence of a coordination policy between Israel and the Gaza water utility, both have extracted an excessively large amount of water from the coastal aquifer. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that in 2018 the annual sustainable recharge of the aquifer, which is fed only by rainwater, was extracted almost three times over. The frequent attacks against civilian objects by the Israeli military have also caused massive destruction of water, water treatment, and sewage infrastructure. For instance, during the latest offensive against the Gaza Strip in May 2021, Israeli military attacks destroyed four water wells and damaged another 20.

Over-extraction, sewage infiltration, lack of effective environmental management, and repeated Israeli military attacks on water and sanitation infrastructure have led to increased pollution and salinity of the groundwater upon which Gaza's two million population depends. As a result, 97 percent of water in the Gaza Strip is unfit for human consumption based on the standards of the World Health Organization. These factors, combined with the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel's unlawful closure of the Gaza Strip, deprive more than two million Palestinians in Gaza of the basic human right to water and sanitation.

This disturbing scenario must be understood within the broader context of Israel’s institutionalized and systemic racial domination and oppression against the Palestinian people. During the 48th session of the Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights presented a report on the Allocation of water sources in the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which highlighted that “Palestinians face continuing discriminatory practices, resulting in preventing them from enjoying their rights to water and sanitation.”

Al Mezan addressed the High Commissioner by pointing out that “Israel’s selective and discriminatory water allocation, solely based on racial grounds, is carried out through various means, including […] unlawful military attacks targeting water and sanitation infrastructure […]. [The] asymmetrical distribution of water between Israelis and Palestinians clearly denotes Israel's intent to discriminate against the latter group to favor the former, thus representing water apartheid.”

On World Water Day 2022, Al Mezan calls on the international community to recognize and condemn Israel’s discriminatory water policies as part of its overarching apartheid regime against the Palestinian people and to take all necessary steps to end said policy and ensure that Israel guarantees Palestinians access to their natural resources, including groundwater, and full enjoyment of their fundamental right to safe and clean water.