[wvns] 600,000 Palestinians lack water
600,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have no regular supply of water
Amira Hass
Thursday, 16 August 2007
[Editor's note: This article by Amira Hass appeared on Sunday's
Haaretz in Hebrew, but I could find no trace of it among the large
number of English translations (so I made a quick rough translation
myself). - Elana]
For about 200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, the supply of running
water this summer is only once a week, and the municipalities are
forced to send water to neighborhoods in rotation. In addition to
those, about 400,000 Palestinians are not connected to the water
network and are dependent mostly in summer (when the springs and wells
run dry) on buying water when it arrives in tanker trucks. Water from
trucks is more expensive in summer, because it travels a long distance.
Abd al-Rahman a-Tamimi, who heads the Palestinian hydrolic group, told
Haaretz that this year an additional reason has been added for the
water crisis: for the past sixteen months, tens of thousands of
families have not paid their water bills because of their
deteriorating economic situations and the public sector not being paid
their salaries. This is after Israel, for the past year, has frozen
payments it has collected that are due to be handed over to the
Palestinian Authority Treasury for customs duties.
Tamimi says that before the freeze of those funds, 15%-20% were unable
to pay their water bills, which prevented the municipalities and
village councils from making needed repairs and improvements or to pay
the Mekorot Company for the water they supply.
The basic reason for the permanent shortage of water is that despite
the natural increase in demand for home use due to the summer heat,
the Mekorot Company, from which the Palestinians buy about 51% of
their water for home use, does not increase the quota allocated to the
Palestinians in the summer.
Israel exploits about 80% of the water from the mountain aquifer, the
only source of water serving the Palestinians, and it allocates only
the remaining 20% to the Palestinians. The Oslo Agreements left the
control of the sources of water in Israel's hands, without making any
adjustments to the way the distribution was allocated. The existing
division has been in existence since 1967. The agreements permitted
the Palestinians to drill new wells in the eastern mountain aquifer,
but the additional amount of water cannot keep up with the increased
demand of the increased Palestinian population.
Also there are problems of infrastructure that cause a lost of water
in the pipes. Since its establishment, the Palestinian Authority has
been attempting to improve the shaky infrastructure that it inherited
from Israel, and there has been a decrease in the amount of water that
is wasted from 42% to 33%. The economic crises of these past few
years has also hurt the ability to keep up the maintenance of the
existing infrastructure, to modernize it and add more communities to
the network.
The yearly average the Palestinian water network supplies in the West
Bank is about 220,000 cubic meters a day for houshold use, which means
about 99 liters per person ( the minimum needed is about 100 liters).
After taking into consideration the quantity per person that is lost
in the system, the amount per person is about 67 liters. There are
large differences from one region to another: 11% receive less than 20
liters per person; 39% receive between 20-50 liters; 44% receive
50-100 liters, and only 4% receive more than 120 liters.
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