Israel has cut off water to 47 Palestinian families in the northern West Bank
Qassam Muaddi reports in Mondoweiss on 10 September 2026:
In the northern Jordan Valley, 47 Palestinian families have gone without water for over a month after Israeli forces bulldozed the roads to their herding community and cut the pipelines that once fed it.
Lutfi Bani Odeh has lived on this land for 45 years. Through them all, the nearby towns of Atouf and Tammoun were where his children went to school, where his family sought healthcare, where they bought what they needed, and sold what they produced. Since early August, all of that has been cut off.
“The Israeli army bulldozed the road to our area, and we have no way to Tammoun except through the hills, which we are forced to walk on foot,” Bani Odeh said, adding that he now spends hours walking seven kilometers on foot, a commute that previously took minutes by car. “The army bulldozed the road I could drive on,” he explained. “I walk seven kilometers just to bring food, medicine, diapers, and other needs, and soon our children will have to walk the same distance when the school year begins in a few weeks.”
But the road is not the worst of it. “We can endure isolation and the lack of some basic needs for a time,” Bani Odeh said. “But we can’t live without water.”
Bani Odeh is one of approximately 300 Palestinians — nearly half of them children — facing imminent displacement in Ras al-Ahmar, Ath-Tha’la, and eastern Atouf in the northern Jordan Valley, after Israeli forces severed the last water pipelines supplying the communities. The water cutoff is part of the construction of a 22-kilometer Israeli military barrier, known as the “Crimson Thread”, running from Ein Shibli to the Tayasir military roadblock, which passes through Palestinian-owned agricultural land and has been described by Israeli rights organization B’Tselem as a deliberate strategy of expulsion.