How one Israeli company controls – and cuts off – Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank

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.”

How the water system works on the West Bank

Mekorot was established in the 1930s under the British Mandate. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the company was given the exclusive right to explore and exploit water in the country. After 1967, that included the lands of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel occupied. Mekorot expanded its operations and was assigned to build the national carrier, a line of water pipes that transports water from the northern part of the country, around the West Bank through Israel’s 1948 proper, to the southern dry areas of the Naqab desert. A large part of this water used to feed the Jordan river before the construction of the carrier in the 1960s.

Ihab Sweiti, of the Palestinian water authority, told Mondoweiss that “natural water sources in Palestine are mostly underground, and they classify into four natural reservoirs; the eastern and western acquifers on both sides of the central hill country, the Jordan Valley Basin, and the coastal acquifer, which is the main water source for Israel and the Gaza Strip. The eastern and Jordan Valley reservoirs are mainly in the West Bank, and the western reservoir extends into Israel, too.”

“Since the occupation of 1967, Mekorot dug more wells in the West Bank, ending up controlling about 25 wells, which it uses to provide water to Israeli settlements and to sell water to many Palestinian municipalities, like Idna,” Sweiti continued.

“When the Mekorot company informed us that they were cutting the water supply from the west Hebron area, including Idna, they said that the reason was that there were too many illegal extensions made by Palestinians along the water line.” 

Sweiti says that the Israeli company claims the stealing of water for the towns and villages in the area reduced the water share for the Israeli settlements. Sweiti admits that Palestinians make irregular extensions along Mekorot’s line, but the data belies the claim that the share of Israeli settlements has been reduced. 

According to the Palestinian Hydrology Group, Palestinians consume an average of 70 liters of water per person per day, while Israelis consume 300. For Israeli settlers in the West Bank, however, the average rises to 800 liters per person a day.

According to the World Health Organization, the healthy average for daily water consumption is 100 to 120 liters per individual per day, which is far above the Palestinian average consumption rate and much further below the daily average consumption of Israeli settlers. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics figures from March 2023, the individual water share of Israeli settlers in the West Bank compared to that of Palestinians is seven to one.

Under international law, both Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s exploitation of the West Bank’s water are illegal. The 4th Geneva Convention, which regulates cases of occupation, explicitly prohibits both the transfer of the citizens of the occupying power to the occupied territory and the exploitation of natural resources of the occupied territory unless it is to the benefit of the occupied population.

When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 between the PLO and Israel, water rights were classified as part of the strategic “final status” negotiations phase, along with Palestinian refugees, borders, the status of Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements. The final status negotiations were supposed to conclude in Camp David in the year 2000, but the accords collapsed. Since then, the administration of water distribution continues to take place according to the Oslo Accords’ provisional mechanism: vastly unequal distribution, and total Israeli control.

This mechanism is based on the formation of a joint committee in which Israeli and Palestinian water authorities regularly review and update the number of wells that Palestinians are allowed to dig or exploit and the quantity of water they can extract and distribute based on population growth.

This regular meeting of the joint committee is supposed to take place every few years. According to Ihab Sweiti, the last meeting happened in 2023, before the war on Gaza started. “We, the Palestinian Water Authority, had several new wells  on the agenda that we wanted to get Israeli approval to dig and operate, and there were two other wells that had already received Israeli approval, including in the west of Hebron.” 

Only technical discussions were left, Sweiti says, but the war on Gaza paralyzed everything. “It is all still pending.”

‘People will literally go thirsty’

In Idna, even the irregular extraction of water by Palestinians was cut short by the Israeli army. “On Sunday, occupation forces raided the area outside Idna where the water line passes, dug the ground, and destroyed all the irregular extensions made by some Palestinians,” Rami Nofal noted. “ As a result, now even water tanks are no longer available. If this continues, in two weeks the crisis will get out of control.” 

“People in Idna will literally go thirsty,” Nofal stressed.

Sweiti maintains that irregular extensions to the main line are a problem for Palestinians, not just Israeli settlements. “The water extracted, which is not accounted for, is eventually deducted from Palestinians’ share,” Sweiti says. “But the area where the line passes is located in Area C, where Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian Authority to have any presence.” 

This means that the Palestinian Authority has no powers to impose order or maintain water infrastructure for Palestinian communities, Sweiti explains. 

“Cutting water off from an entire area or city is not a solution,” he says. “The solution is to allow us Palestinians to run our own water supply and have our own water sources.”