By denying Palestinians safe water, Israel has created an unparalleled health crisis and risks causing irreversible ecological damage.

Denying water to Gaza has been a key tactic of the war from the very beginning, with Israel shutting off the pipes supplying the enclave on October 7. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

At the end of October, an internal U.S. State Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink a potentially lethal mix of water polluted with sewage and salt from the sea. Since then, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been severely weakened by rampant hunger and disease, as well as the physical wounds inflicted on nearly 60,000 people and the mental stress of ceaseless bombardment that has taken more than 23,500 lives. All of this renders Palestinians in Gaza even more vulnerable to water-borne illnesses.

By the end of December, as WHO reported, the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in the southern city of Rafah had access to, on average, one toilet for every 486 people, while across Gaza one shower served an average of 4,500 people. Sewage flows through the streets and contaminates the hastily erected tents in which hundreds of thousands of people now live throughout southern and central Gaza. Those who are menstruating face intense hardship, with menstrual products, toilets, and water all in direly short supply. 

    • vind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      486·
      10 months ago

      Israel does something bad: “oh HAMAS FORCED THEM TO”

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        738·
        10 months ago

        I’m just super fucking tired of the one-sided narrative on here. It’s fucking bizarre when talking about a dumb ass religious conflict between two assholes.

            • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.worldEnglish
              74·
              10 months ago

              Russia’s genocide of Ukraine is not proportionally as steep as Israel’s genocide of Palestineans in Gaza, but it’s the second time they try it in 100 years and it only caused them to collapse the last time, and they’re lying about their victims to try to frame them as the oppressors just like the Likud do in Israel with their lies about all Palestineans supporting and cheering for atrocities committed by Hamas. Sic semper tyrannis.

              I am 97.5% sure that the name “Crossfire Hurricane” was a reference to a Russian-Israeli set of active measures involving the late Epstein-Maxwell spy ring that was designed to strip moral authority over stateless people (as settled after world war 2) from western powers. But Jeff Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel (the dude from the Israel Army hat photo) were both allowed to commit suicide in custody, the Crossfire Hurricane dossier was last seen (of record) going home with Mark Meadows according to Cassidy Hutchinson and the DOJ have signaled that they aren’t going to move on the Republican mafia any time soon.

    • EndlessApollo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      418·
      10 months ago

      Yep, it’s Hamas’s fault that Israel is committing genocide and stealing their land, definitely wasn’t happening before. Go fuck yourself zionist bitch 💖

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      315·
      10 months ago

      What? This is a continuation of a long-standing Israeli policy

      The deprivation of water and the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure have long been part of the Israeli effort, in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, “to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population,” as a UN Fact Finding Mission stated in 2009.

      Past Israeli military operations in both of these occupied territories have also led to the destruction of water resources. And for decades, Israel has used water grabbing to dispossess Palestinians of their land and ways of life — impeding Palestinian agriculture in the West Bank and for Palestinians inside Israel. But Israel’s weaponization of water within the framework of its current offensive on the Gaza Strip is on an entirely different scale, with the capacity to cause an unparalleled public health crisis and irreversible ecological damage.

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        520·
        10 months ago

        Israel are assholes and the international community should have come along a long fucking time ago to address the bullshit settlement stuff. Absolute bellends. But you know, my god is better than yours, so fuck right off, amiright?

        • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          295·
          10 months ago

          There are certainly religious aspects, but this is first and foremost a settler colonialist land grab Totally agree with the rest of your statement tho

          “…the takeover of the West Bank in particular, with its ancient biblical sights, was a Zionist aim even before 1948 and it fitted the logic of the Zionist project as a whole. This logic can be summarized as the wish to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible… After the occupation, the new ruler confined the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in an impossible limbo: they were neither refugees nor citizens—they were, and still are, citizenless inhabitants. They were inmates, and in many respects still are, of a huge prison in which they have no civil, and human rights and no impact on their future. The world tolerates this situation because Israel claims —and the claim was never challenged until recently—that the situation is temporary…Israel is still incarcerating a third generation of Palestinians…and depicting these mega-prisons as temporary…”

          • Municipal0379@lemmy.worldEnglish
            325·
            10 months ago

            Lolololololol. I’m definitely left of center and even I know “colonialist land grab” is bs. Israel has plenty of problems. Calling this a “colonialist land grab” isn’t on their list of fuck ups.

            • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.worldEnglish
              163·
              10 months ago

              If you can’t see how Zionist Israel’s ethnic cleansing is motivated by white settler colonialism then your lefty card is probably just a cardboard circle from all the corners you’ve cut off it.