Bombing plants, severing pipelines: Israel pushes Gaza water crisis to the brink
Palestinians collect drinking water in Gaza City, central Gaza, 10 April 2025
Ibtisam Mahdi reports in +972 on 23 April 2025:
Wissam Badawi spends her days waiting and listening, in the hope that she might hear the distinctive honk of a water truck entering her neighborhood. These trucks, manned by local volunteers, have become the last lifeline for the 49-year-old mother of eight along with thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City, amid an increasingly severe water crisis caused by Israel’s ongoing assault on the Strip.
“Most of the water pipelines have been destroyed due to bulldozing by the Israeli army, and the municipality can’t repair them,“ Badawi, who lives in the neighborhood of Tel Al-Hawa, told +972. “There’s no well nearby, so I have to send my kids to the sea to fetch water for daily use. Then I wait for the truck to arrive so I can mix clean water with the seawater to reduce its salinity and make it drinkable.“
Due to the extreme shortage, the price of water in Gaza’s markets has skyrocketed. “The cost of a gallon of water ranges from NIS 5-8 [$1.30-$2.20]. We need about five gallons a day for drinking and cooking, and it’s hard for me to afford that. Besides, there’s no one selling water in our area — so if no trucks arrive, I have to walk a long distance to buy it.”
In areas where there are no trucks to bring water, many Gazans are forced to walk for miles and queue for hours to fill up a single container at a well. But even these are in increasingly short supply, having either been bombed or rendered inaccessible by Israeli evacuation orders. UNICEF has warned that the water crisis in the Strip has reached “critical levels,” noting that only one in 10 people currently have access to clean drinking water.