How one Israeli company controls – and cuts off – Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank
Israeli soldiers surround a bulldozer as it destroys a Palestinian water well in the West Bank
Qassam Muaddi writes in Mondoweiss on 22 July 2025:
For 100 days, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank town of Idna have been surviving without running water. The town of some 40,000 inhabitants has been relying on rain reservoirs and water tanks sold by vendors. The town’s water crisis was provoked by the April decision of Israeli national water company Mekorot to reduce the daily provision of water to the Hebron governorate of the southern West Bank. The water supply shrank from 32,000 cubic meters to 26,000, which included completely shutting down Mekorot’s water line for Idna.
This water crisis isn’t new, and it isn’t limited to Idna. Every summer, multiple parts of the West Bank experience prolonged water cuts that can extend for up to a month, mainly due to the lack of water supply by Mekorot, which controls most of the water resources in Palestine.
In Idna, residents met in the municipality hall on Monday to discuss the crisis. The mayor of the town shared the Israeli company’s argument for cutting off their water: that some residents were “illegally stealing water.”
“The mayor said that it is not the municipality’s responsibility to look for those who steal water, but to provide water to residents, which is being made impossible,” Rami Nofal, a local journalist and resident of Idna, told Mondoweiss. “Every summer, we go through water cuts, and the argument that some individuals steal water from the main line is not an excuse to leave 40,000 people without water for three months,” he said.
The mayor went on to assure the crowd that the Palestinian Authority is trying to fix the crisis with Mekorot, but no news of a solution was forthcoming. “In Idna, like in the rest of the West Bank, we receive water on specific days of the week, and my neighborhood’s turn was in April, just a few days before the complete cut was scheduled,” Nofal went on. “I bought a water tank of 13 cubic meters for 180 shekels, and this is the water that my family and I are saving to survive on.”
Tanks of this sort dot the roofs of all buildings in the West Bank, as water shortages are chronic. “We have to watch for every instance of water consumption,” Nofal explained. “Every time my children open the faucet, I tell them to close it back as soon as they can. We economize while washing and even when flushing the toilet.”