Palestine: “We Need Water”

Facebook
Twitter
Email
WhatsApp
Print

by Reinhard Kober

Halhul, to the north of al-Khalil (Hebron) is a beautiful hilltop town, surrounded by fields and lovely gardens.  Like other cities in the Palestinian Authority-administered Area A, its population has grown from 3,000 in the sixties to 30,000 now.

The Abu Jamal family, along with many others living east of the green line border, may no longer work legally in Israel.  So they invested in greenhouses, cultivated eggplants and tomatoes, and were generally successful at first.

When I asked Abu Jamal how his farming is going now, he shrugged his shoulders and his face showed immediately that things are becoming worse.  “We don’t have the water we need,” he said.  “Just three hours of access to water per week is not enough.” 

According to OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and an Amnesty International report, Palestinians are denied access to the water aquifer underneath their own land.  On average, Israelis use 300 liters of water per day, Palestinians only 60 liters.  Palestinians are not even allowed to dig their own wells.  An OCHA official told me, “It’s easy to make the fields bloom [in Israel] when you deny others the use of their own water.”

Read More Stories

An aerial view of Oak Flat lands, red stones and mountains under a blue sky with a layer of white clouds

Kill the sacred or stop the mine

At Oak Flat, the capitalist powers of destruction seem to want to play God – but how does one destroy all that sustains life in favour of scars of death?

A compilation of the logos of the undersigned organizations

Sekiz Yıllık Şiddet, Ayrımcılık, Tecrit ve Dışlanma

Mart 2016’da AB-Türkiye Mutabakaı’nın yayınlandığında, devletlerin mültecilerin haklarını koruma konusundaki uluslararası yükümlülüklerini tamamen göz ardı etmesi nedeniyle insan hakları grupları tarafından şiddetle kınanmıştı

A compilation of the logos of the undersigned organizations

Eight years of Violence, Discrimination, Segregation, and Exclusion 

On the eighth anniversary of the EU-Turkey Statement, we denounce Turkey and EU states’ consistent failure to uphold their international obligations with regard to migrants and refugees, and strengthen our joint commitment to challenge all official and unofficial policies that lead to the discrimination, segregation, and ultimately exclusion of migrants.

Skip to content