Let There Be Water by Seth M. Siegel

Author:Seth M. Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466885448
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Gaza: Waiting for the Water to Get Worse

Gaza is in the news mostly because of the miniwars with Israel that break out every few years. But the greatest threat to the well-being of the people of Gaza might well be that they are only a few years away from a water crisis of unimaginable scope. If not addressed in time, the impending crisis will result in an environmental disaster permanently changing the quality of life there.23

If the complaints in the West Bank center on the water pressure and need for more water, at least there is general agreement that water pumped to homes is of a consistently high quality and, with rare exceptions, safe to drink. But Gaza, a small territory along the Mediterranean coast about forty miles from the West Bank at its closest point, is unconnected to the West Bank’s water system. The two may be joined by national identity and political aspiration, but not by geology. Israelis and Palestinians alike agree: The water in Gaza is bad and growing worse.

Unlike the West Bank, which has deep aquifers and multiple sources of water, Gaza gets most of its water from a shallow reserve found as little as a few dozen feet below the generally porous soil. The shallow aquifer—the Southern Coastal Aquifer—allows for easy access for drilled or dug wells, but also for pollutants to percolate from the soil surface into the freshwater.

Professor Yousef Abu Mayla, a hydrologist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, explains how Palestinian agriculture has contributed to Gaza’s looming water emergency. “There is high unemployment in Gaza, and this led to people turning to farming,” he says. “They often use inefficient irrigation techniques that not only waste water but which also permit fertilizer to get into the aquifer.”24 Gaza utilizes sixty-five percent of its available water for agriculture, in what is largely an urban area, placing a strain on an already overburdened source.25

Agricultural mismanagement is only part of the aquifer’s degradation. “The municipality in Gaza City only provides water once or twice a week,” says Professor Abu Mayla, speaking of the territory’s largest city, which is home to over one-third of Gaza’s estimated 1.8 million people.26 “In response, someone in nearly every apartment building dug a well to get all of the water they needed.” In all, Abu Mayla estimates, there are more than twelve thousand wells in Gaza of which only twenty-five hundred went through the permit and inspection process. This led to overpumping of the aquifer, and when the well was not dug properly, as he believes is overwhelmingly the case in Gaza, contaminants and impurities also percolated into the aquifer.27

Another threat to Gaza’s water supply is the failure to treat sewage. Every day, about twenty-four million gallons of sewage are either stored in growing pools of human waste or dumped untreated into the Mediterranean Sea.28 A lot of the stored waste in Gaza spills out of the holding pens. Some portion of that sewage percolates through the ground into the aquifer, further polluting Gaza’s drinking water.

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