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A Palestinian youth drinks water from a public tap in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip - Source: Reuters
Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report that
Israeli restrictions prevented Palestinians from receiving enough
water in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The report said Israel's daily water consumption per capita was
four times higher than that in the Palestinian territories.
"Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians
obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water
has become a luxury that they can barely afford," said Amnesty's
Donatella Rovera.
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed
Amnesty's statement that Israel was depriving the Palestinians of
water as preposterous.
Israel says it has met its obligations under the 1993 Oslo
agreement while Palestinians have failed to meet their own
requirements to recycle water and were not distributing water
efficiently.
"Israel supplied Palestians 20.8 million cubic litres above and
beyond what it is obliged to do under the water agreement," said
Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev.
Israel, itself facing unprecedented water shortages and rising
tariffs, controls much of the West Bank's supplies, pumping from an
aquifer that bridges Israel and the territory.
Israel sells some water back to the Palestinians under quotas
agreed in the Oslo accords that rights groups say have not been
increased in line with population growth.
The report said Gaza's coastal aquifer, its sole fresh water
resource, had been polluted by infiltration of seawater and raw
sewage and degraded by over-extraction.
Israel maintains a blockade of the Gaza Strip, an area taken over
by the Islamist Hamas movement which defeated Palestinian forces
loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007.
Israel's water authority called the report biased and incorrect, at
the very least and said that while there was a water gap, it was
not nearly as big as presented in Amnesty's findings.
Amnesty said water consumption in Israel was 300 litres a day per
person and 70 litres a day in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel's water authority said those numbers were misleading because
they took into account internal distribution and did not compare
total water consumption.
It said the total figures were 408 litres per day for Israelis
and 287 litres for Palestinians.
The Amnesty report described how Palestinians in the West Bank
relied on water from tankers that were forced to take long detours
to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads off-limits to
Palestinians.
The situation had led to steep increases in water prices, the
report said.
