Gaza municipality warns of imminent thirst crisis as water shortage reaches 90%
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Gaza Municipality has warned of an escalating water emergency in the city, saying a severe shortage is worsening amid a sharp depletion of supplies after damage to a key pipeline.
In a statement published on its official Facebook page on Wednesday, the municipality said the water pipeline provided by the Israeli water company, Mekorot had been disrupted during bulldozing operations carried out by Israeli occupation forces east of the city and was directly damaged, cutting a supply line that previously covered around 70 per cent of Gaza City’s current water needs.
The municipality said the crisis has been compounded by extensive damage to water infrastructure, including the destruction of nearly 85% of water wells in Gaza City, further restricting available supplies for residents.
It said daily water demand before the war exceeded 100,000 cubic metres, but only a limited proportion of that need is now being met, leaving a deficit of about 90 per cent compared with pre-war levels.
The statement added that the destruction of nearly 150,000 linear metres of water networks, as well as damage to a desalination plant in the Sudaniya area north-west of the city, has reduced alternative sources that had previously eased pressure on the system.
According to the municipality, the latest break in the Mekorot pipeline led to water outages across wide areas of the city, including the Old City, Zeitoun, Sabra and Tel al-Hawa neighbourhoods, as well as parts of western Gaza City.
Gaza Municipality said it is continuing to coordinate with the Palestinian Water Authority to access the site and begin repair work, in an effort to restore part of the lost supply and limit the scale of the outage.
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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
