Lack of water worsens misery in Gaza as Israeli airstrikes continue
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — As Israel pounds the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, Laila Abu Samhadaneh, 65, is anxious about water. The besieged Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people don’t have access to clean, running water after Israel cut off water and electricity to the enclave as it intensifies its air attacks in response to a bloody Hamas attack last week. The chokehold has seen taps run dry across the territory. When water does trickle from pipes, the meager flow lasts no more than 30 minutes each day and is so contaminated with sewage and seawater that it’s undrinkable, residents said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do tomorrow,” Abu Samhadaneh said from her three-room home in the southern town of Rafah, which turned into a de facto shelter after Israel demanded everyone in Gaza evacuate south. She said she rations just a few liters among dozens of friends and relatives each day. “We’re going crazy.” The deprivation has plunged Gaza’s population deeper into misery as Israel’s bombardment intensifies one week after Hamas fighters surged across Israel’s separation fence, killing 1,300 Israelis and abducting dozens. Israel’s retaliatory strikes have crushed hundreds of buildings in Gaza and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians. Even as terrified families flee their homes — squeezing into United Nations shelters or the bloody and chaotic halls of Gaza’s biggest hospital in fear for their safety — the desperate search for water remains a constant. U.N. agencies and aid groups are beseeching Israel to permit emergency deliveries of fuel and other supplies into the Gaza Strip. “There really can’t be a justification for this kind of targeting of civilians,” said Miriam Marmur, a spokesperson for Gisha, an Israeli human rights group. The U.N. Palestinian refugee agency called the water crisis a “matter of life or death.” If fuel and water don’t arrive soon, the agency’s commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini said, “people will start dying of severe dehydration.” In normal times, the coastal enclave — which has struggled under an Israeli-Egyptian blockade since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 — relies on Israel for one-third of all available drinking water, the territory’s water authority says. Its other water sources include desalination plants in the Mediterranean Sea and a subterranean aquifer, drained and damaged from years of overuse. When Israel severed electricity to Gaza, the desalination plants all shut down. So did the wastewater treatment stations. That has
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