Water is a weapon in Israel’s slow motion genocide
On August 4, 2026, The Palestine Chronicle published “Thirsty, Wounded, Still Alive: Gaza’s Artists in the Water Line” by Gaza resident Hani al-Salmy, the author of 20 novels. Al-Salmy writes about his encounters with three prominent cultural workers from Gaza, who are waiting in “the endless water line” to fill their empty water containers.
The first is Naseem Nasr, a well-known theater director, who tells him that “Gaza itself has become an open theater of tragedy.” The second is the prominent painter Nasser Amer, who says that “for the first time in my life, I have learned that color itself can weep.” To the third, the musician and composer Jabr al-Hajj, “the most exquisite rhythm is the sound of water pouring into a displaced person’s container after hours of deadly waiting.”
Those “hours of deadly waiting” now define the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, as detailed by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) in its damning 42-page report, Water as a weapon: Israel’s destruction and deprivation of water and sanitation in Gaza(April 2026). The report does not mince words when it describes how water scarcity and “entirely preventable dire sanitation and hygiene conditions” are deliberately engineered by Israel as a form of life-defying collective punishment of the entire population.
The impact of Israel’s weaponization of water on women and girls is the focus of a June 2026 briefing paper by Oxfam International, Seven ways the water crisis in Gaza is hurting women. Water production in Gaza is now less than a quarter of what it was before Oct. 7, 2023, when Gaza’s population was already experiencing a dire water shortage. Today, many parts of Gaza have access to only 3 – 5 liters of clean water per person a day (well below the 15 liter minimum standard set by the UN). Females – including young girls, the elderly, and pregnant women - are primarily responsible for walking long distances to water collection points and waiting for hours in the heat to fill containers that then need to be hauled back to tents and damaged homes and somehow made sufficient for drinking, cooking and family hygiene. The harassment and humiliation they endure, the plight of women with disabilities and chronic illnesses, the ordeal caused by lack of accessible toilets and sanitation products for menstruating women and girls, and the psychological stress caused by the daily search for water are documented in the report.
A year ago, New Lines Magazine (July 29, 2025) featured an article entitled “The Toxic Blowback of Israel’s Bombs” by Lesley Joseph warning about the impact of ‘ecocide’ on Gaza’s population. Beyond the skin and respiratory infections, hepatitis, diarrhea and other waterborne illnesses that now sweep through the Gaza Strip are the long-term risks presented by thousands of decomposing bodies, and the chemicals and toxic heavy metals from bombs that migrate through the soil into the water supply, causing birth defects and cancers, and eventually damaging brains, lungs, livers and nervous systems. “Palestinians say that Gaza carries the smell of death,” Prof. Joseph writes, “and in the current situation that smell is not going away.”
