Gaza residents find ingenious ways of finding fresh food and water

Despite the horrific challenges of  living in Gaza—where 96% of the water is unfit for human consumption—residents have employed a variety of methods to survive. Here is but one of the examples in this inspiring article:

“Last year, Gaza photographer Fayez al-Hindi created his own water distillation and purification system using solar energy. Tap water is poured into a three-metre-long basin, and as it evaporates onto the panels, it purifies and the clean water drops into a separate basin. 

On an average sunny day in winter, his invention produces four to six litres of clean drinking water for his family.”

Alternative farming on the rise in besieged Gaza

Fayez al-Hindi created his own water distillation and purification system using solar energy [Mersiha Gadzo/Al Jazeera]

Under this new agreement, water inequality remains in tact.

Israeli building settlement building plans include a “doubling of water supplies to the West Bank:

“Though Palestinians will now have autonomy to lay pipelines, what they won’t have is any additional water to go in them – except with Israeli consent.”

Renewing cooperation on water: what hope for the two state solution?

 

Conditions in Gaza Spiral Downwards

Each survival challenge affects the others: 

“The argument over whether Israel has effective control over Gaza doesn’t alter the facts: Some 95 percent of the water in Gaza’s aquifer isn’t fit to drink, and purified water is distributed to households under unhygienic conditions; there is electricity for eight hours a day or less; about 100 million liters of sewage flow into the sea every day, both because of the power outages and because of delays in bringing spare parts and new pumps into Gaza; the residue of spent Israeli ammunition affects the environment and people’s health in ways that have yet to be investigated; unemployment has soared to about 40 percent, because Israeli movement restrictions have strangled production; and hundreds of thousands of young people who have never left this crowded enclave know no other reality.”

Ahead of a Disaster in Gaza

A Palestinian woman bakes bread in a tent outside her dwelling in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip December 19, 2016.  IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS

Another Atrocity against Bedouins

Israel’s relentless attacks of water sources in the West Bank continue:

“ Nearly 200,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank do not have access to running water, according to Amnesty International.

Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq stated in a 2013 report that just half of Palestinian proposals for wells and improvement projects to the water network were approved by Israel between 1995 and 2008, compared to a 100 percent approval rate for Israeli projects.”

Israeli forces destroy water pipeline serving Bedouin villages in northern West Bank

For more on the long plight of Bedouins see Facts & Context