Israeli attacks on Palestinian water supplies in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip accounted for a quarter of all water-related violence in 2023, as armed conflicts over dwindling resources surged globally, according to new research.
Almost 350 water conflicts were documented worldwide in 2023, a 50% rise on 2022, which was also a record year, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water violence. The violence included attacks on dams, pipelines, wells, treatment plants and workers, as well as public unrest and disputes over access to water, and the use of water as a weapon of war.
Overall, water-related violence has been rising steadily since 2000 but has surged in recent years as the climate crisis and growing scarcity exacerbate old conflicts over land, ideology and religion, economics and sovereignty, and new ones erupt, according to the Water Conflict Chronology. In 2000, just 20 water conflicts were documented by the tracker.
Regions with major jumps in water violence include Latin America and the Caribbean, a region hit by drought and unequal access to water resources, where year-on-year the number of incidents rose more than threefold to 48 in 2023. In Bolívar, Colombia, police fired guns and teargas to disperse residents protesting a 10-day water outage, injuring four.
Meanwhile in India, severe drought and community disputes over access to irrigation water for farmland drove a 150% increase in water conflicts last year, with 25 incidents including clashes between communities in the neighboring southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Cauvery River.
“All these cases highlight different aspects of the growing water crisis: the failure to enforce and respect international law; the failure to provide safe water and sanitation for all; and the growing threat of climate change and severe drought,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an independent research and policy organization which created the conflict tracker in 1985.
“There was a massive uptick in violence over water in 2023, widely around the world, but especially in the Middle East.”
Water conflicts in the Middle East accounted for 38% of last year’s total, driven in large part by attacks on Palestinian water supplies and infrastructure in the occupied territories, according to the tracker, which monitors news reports, eyewitness accounts, UN reports and other conflict databases.
Israeli settlers and/or armed forces contaminated and destroyed water wells, pumps and irrigation systems on 90 occasions during 2023 – the equivalent of more than seven water-related acts of violence every month.
In Gaza, the water situation was already dire before Israel launched its war in retaliation for the deadly attack by Hamas on 7 October, after which much of the water and wastewater infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, damaged or left unusable.
In November, Israeli airstrikes partially destroyed solar panels and other infrastructure providing energy for the EU-supported Gaza Central wastewater treatment plant, which served 1 million people. In another attack, the Israeli military began pumping seawater into Hamas’s tunnel complex in an effort to destroy the clandestine transport and communications system, an action that risked “ruining the basic conditions for life in Gaza” – an element of the crime of genocide, a senior hydrologist told the Guardian in December.
In the West Bank, much of the water violence appeared to be linked to the annexation and settlements by Israelis that were ruled unlawful by the international court of justice in a landmark advisory opinion.
In one documented case from September, Israeli settlers from Shaarei Tikva reportedly pumped wastewater on to Palestinian agricultural lands east of Qalqilya, causing damage to olive trees and crops. In another from November, Israeli settlers reportedly demolished homes, a school’s water tanks and a water pipeline, and uprooted dozens of young olive trees in the occupied city of Hebron.
The Israeli foreign ministry has rejected the ICJ ruling as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided. The government has been approached for comment.
Meanwhile, the number of water-related attacks in the war between Russia and Ukraine dropped by 26% compared with 2022 but remained high, with 32 reported incidents. This included Russian forces blowing up a dam on the Mokri Yaly River in mid-June 2023, causing flooding on both banks, reportedly to slow down a Ukrainian counteroffensive. In September, power lines and a water main were damaged by Ukrainian forces shelling in Gordeevka, Kursk.
“The large increase in these events signals that too little is being done to ensure equitable access to safe and sufficient water and highlights the devastation that war and violence wreak on civilian populations and essential water infrastructure,” said Morgan Shimabuku, senior researcher with the Pacific Institute.
“The new analysis exposes the increasing risk that climate change adds to already fragile political situations by making access to clean water less reliable in areas of conflict around the world.”
