COLUMN, Pat Hynes, Greenfield Recorder, October 4, 2024
https://www.recorder.com/Columnist-Pat-Hynes-57276827

In late 2020, a report titled “Saving Gaza Begins with its Water” stated: “The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave … The aquifer from which it pumps water is diminishing, but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as pollution.”

The authors of the report end on a cautiously positive note: “The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise,” they wrote, because “Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation” because one of Israel’s water sources is the same coastal aquifer.

But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus.

At the current rate of killing and death, 15-20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a U.N. expert stated, and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.

Before the current war, Gaza had 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water. By late December 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed all but one of the desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5% of typical levels.

With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under 5 in Gaza jumped 2,000%, with the result that children under 5 are over 20 times more likely to die from dehydration than from Israeli military violence.

More than three quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to relocate because of Israeli bombing of refugee settlements. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons, and little to no running water.

Every human being in Gaza suffers soulshattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes) and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Women and their children are its gravest victims: 70% of those killed are women and children. Daily in Gaza, children are having one or both legs amputated without anesthesia. More than 17,000 children have lost both parents.

More recently American doctors who volunteered in Gaza and spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Gazans. They pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on the state of Israel and immediate cease-fire.”

The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”

What can be done? Nothing without the state of Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination and courage, it is achievable.” But “the war must be ended.”

The state of Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba — “catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force; systemic apartheid for all Palestinians; establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by force; and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians, whose ancestors have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years.

Without justice — the U.S. ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent cease-fire, the mutual exchange of prisoners, the U.N. recognizing Palestine as a state and organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries — there can be no peace.

“A haunting question that weighs heavily, ” writes political scientist M. Reza Behnam, “is why another Holocaust — this one televised — has been tolerated in Gaza when the world declared after the Second World War, ‘Never Again?’” 

Pat Hynes of Montague, a board member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, gave the presentation “Water, War and Women” during a 2024 conference sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom titled “Water on the Frontlines for Peace.” This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.

H. PATRICIA HYNES

FROM GLOBAL TO LOCAL