Ameera and Heba, two sisters aged 13 and 10, stand in line each day to fill drinking water containers near their destroyed school, which has been closed and turned into a stopover for a water truck. People crowd around to fill their gallons, and the sisters often wait for more than three hours each day before they can return home and haul two heavy 16-liter jugs back to their family. This has become the family’s only way of getting water.
After the sisters help their mother prepare the iftar meal to break their fast during Ramadan, the family of eight eats in complete darkness at sunset due to the lack of electricity. The battery they rely on for dim lighting soon runs out, plunging them into darkness until the predawn suhur meal.
There is no consistent source of electricity or water in Gaza, as Israel has shut down everything that might help Palestinians survive. “We suffer when we think about drinking water or moving around in the dark. No one lives like this, but this is our reality now,” Ameera tells Mondoweiss. “My sister and I are exhausted from going every day to get water. We miss the days before the war when a clean water truck would stop at our door to fill the tanks on our roof. But even our roof is gone. Everything in Gaza is gone.”
Palestinians in Gaza have never had reliable access to electricity for the past 18 years. But since October 7, the power in Gaza was completely shut off from the Strip. Providers of essential services like hospitals and water desalination stations, which depend on electricity, were already operating on stored fuel before the ceasefire broke down last week and Israel resumed its genocidal war. During the ceasefire, the Health Ministry issued warnings every few weeks stating that hospitals would cease operations without a more consistent fuel supply. Now that the war has resumed, the supply has stopped completely.
Before the war, the Gaza Strip depended on two sources of electricity: the power produced by the only electricity company in Gaza, which produced 46 megawatts, and the electricity supplied by the Israeli lines, which provided 120 megawatts. Even when Gaza received that entire supply before October 7, it still suffered from a 63 percent power shortage, as the total need for Gaza is 450 megawatts per day.
Muhammad Thabet, a representative of the Gaza power company, tells Mondoweiss that 10 Israeli power lines supplying 120 megawatts to Gaza’s five governorates were shut off on October 7, 2023. “Then, on October 11, the Gaza power company shut down due to the shortage in fuel,” Thabet said.
In November 2024, at the height of the genocide, UNICEF and other international organizations asked the power company in Gaza to repair the electricity line between the water desalination station and the Israeli side. The humanitarian situation in the central and southern Gaza Strip had been catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands of displaced people in tents and camps without access to uncontaminated water sources. Diseases such as Polio began to reappear. International humanitarian organizations put pressure on Israel, which allowed in some amounts of fuel to the power company. Eventually, it was able to repair the line.
“The power company repaired an electricity cable with a length of 8 kilometers after it received a fuel supply between the water station and the Israeli side,” Thabet explains. “Then the desalination station became operational again and was able to produce twenty thousand cubic meters of water per day. That helped people to reach clean sources of water.”
The ceasefire in Gaza began to deteriorate following the conclusion of the first phase of the agreement in late February. Netanyahu decided to cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza in early March, and on March 9, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen announced a decision to cut off Gaza’s electricity supply.
Now that the war has resumed, the only light visible in Gaza is coming from Israeli bombardment.
Gaza water supply running dry
The Gaza Strip’s water supply depends on three primary sources: groundwater, water supplied directly from Israel through the national water company (Mekorot), and central desalination plants that belong to the Coastal Municipality Water Utility in Gaza.
Hosni Muhanna, a spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, tells Mondoweiss that desalination covers a negligible amount of Gaza’s water needs. “The municipality is unable to deliver water to large areas due to the extensive damage to the water networks and pipelines,” he explains.
According to Muhanna, health disasters, including water contamination and the spread of disease, will soon emerge following the cutoff of water supplies. “The central desalination stations have entirely shut down due to power outages, fuel shortages, and the unavailability of spare parts for maintenance,” he points out, adding that the groundwater in Gaza is polluted and mixed with sewage, leaving the Strip entirely dependent on water supplied by Israel.
“People are forced to drink contaminated water,” he says, stating that the war has destroyed over 70 percent of the wells and desalination plants in Gaza and that large sections of the water network were targeted during Israel’s bombardment campaign.
“The Mekorot water pumping system was halted for a long period during the war, then resumed at reduced capacity [during the ceasefire],” Muhanna added.
With the return of the war in mid-March, Mekorot cut off the water supply yet again.
Muhanna stresses that water is a basic human right that should not be used as a negotiating tactic by Israel. “Water cannot be used as a tool for collective punishment against civilians,” he says.