A Lack of Aid and Water in Gaza Are Creating “A Catastrophe the Size of Which We Don’t Know Yet”

Searching for water, finding water, waiting for water, lugging the water in buckets and jerry cans: this is the daily struggle in many pockets of Gaza. The next day the search starts anew. There is never enough water. 

On a recent trip to a camp in Gaza, UNICEF Communication Officer Saleem Oweis asked kids what they did during the day. Their answer: fetching water. They can’t carry so much, and they have to take breaks because the walks – there and back – are long, all of it in the August heat and humidity. But the needs are so great in Gaza that these duties are shared among adults and children. Families also have to seek food, and fuel, and medicine, and some semblance of safety. It is an exhausting effort just to survive, amid repeat displacements and relentless Israeli bombardment for ten straight months.

“The situation is really dire when you go into the camps and into the hospitals and see how people are dealing with what should have been a daily task of bringing water or food – and it is daily, but it’s not as simple as that,” Oweis said, speaking from Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza last week. “It’s a long process and tiresome process for families and for children.” 

The water, and the interminable mission to find it, reveals how the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza compounds upon itself – and how all of it is a direct consequence of Israel’s campaign. “It is being used as a weapon of war, denying the people access to their clear water, for the right to water,” said Riham Jafari, Advocacy and Communications Coordinator at ActionAid Palestine, speaking from the West Bank.

According to a July report from Oxfam International, Israel has damaged or destroyed five water or sanitation sites every three days since the start of the war. That, along with cutting off external water supplies and deliberate aid obstruction, have caused the water supply in Gaza to plummet by 94 percent. That comes out to less than 5 liters per day per person in Gaza, far below the United Nations standard of 15 liters. 

What water is available in Gaza can be dirty and contaminated. That has contributed to poor sanitation and hygiene, which has increased the spread of disease, especially in crowded camps with limited access to medicine and other treatments. Some 65,000 people have skin rashes, according to the World Health Organization. Aid groups try to distribute hygiene kits, but available supplies cannot come close to what Palestinians need. Soap only goes so far when there is no water, and no way to dispose of sewage. 

Oweis says a UNICEF-supported water and desalination plant is still functioning in Deir al-Balah, but only at about 10 percent capacity because it lacks the fuel necessary for full operations. The plant used to turn out about 20,000 cubic meters of water daily. It now generates about 2,500 to 3,000 cubic meters. A little of that goes into what’s left of the water system. A little more gets put on delivery trucks for distribution – but the scarcity of fuel also means those trucks don’t go very far. The rest goes to those waiting for hours to fill up their buckets. 

“The heat, the disease, lack of water, is, I think, contributing to a catastrophe the size of which we don’t know yet, and scale of which we don’t know yet,” said Ahmed Bayram, Middle East and North Africa regional media adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). 

“There Is No Safe Place in Gaza”

As Bayram said, the Norwegian Refugee Council has not been able to transfer aid to its warehouse in Gaza since early May. About 500 pallets are stranded at the Kerem Shalom crossing, rotting in the sun. Israel, even though it denies that it is restricting aid to Palestinians, is impeding aid access with lengthy inspections that create bottlenecks at the crossings. Even when the aid gets through to Gaza, it is incredibly difficult to get it to the more than two million Palestinians who need it.

Israel’s active military campaign threatens aid deliveries, and the bombs destroy roads required to transport goods. The routes themselves are also unsafe, as looters seek out trucks and try to ransack aid, putting humanitarian workers at risk. All of these trucks require fuel, which remains in short supply. About 175 total trucks have made it through to Gaza in August, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) tracker, all through the Kerem Shalom crossing. Before the war, about 500 trucks arrived in Gaza each day.

“The whole humanitarian community here is struggling to get any aid in,” Oweis said. 

“So many items are not getting in as they should be, including medicine and supplies for water and hygiene and different things that should be basic responses in this situation,” he added.

These ongoing though relatively slow-motion problems have deepened the overall emergency in Gaza, while making the acute nature of the humanitarian crisis that much harder to convey. As tensions rise in the region, along with the very real risks of escalation, the urgency of the situation in Gaza has not broken through in the same way. “The story has moved on, but the struggle and the suffering continues,” Bayram said. 

Israel is currently renewing its push in southern Gaza, particularly in the city of Khan Younis. Thousands are once again forced to flee, many already displaced several times over. About 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been uprooted, and Israel continues to limit the amount of space in so-called “humanitarian zones.” Norwegian Refugee Council recently estimated that only about 14.5 percent of land is available to civilians, although these places are still targeted in Israeli strikes. Um Raed Abu Elyan, who was evacuating Khan Younis with her family, told Reuters that they were “running from the fire, we are running with our children from fear.”

“They said to go to humanitarian areas, but there is no safe place here in Gaza. It is all destroyed and damaged,” she said, in a story published August 9th.

International aid organizations echoed this: there is no safe place in Gaza. This weekend, an Israeli strike on a Gaza school compound killed at least 90 civilians, according to Gaza’s civil defense agency. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it was targeting a Hamas command center, but media could not independently verify those claims, and this is a line the IDF has repeatedly used to justify attacks that kill civilians. This was also the fifth IDF strike on a school this August. Last week, Israeli attacks hit two schools in Gaza City where people were sheltering, killing at least 16. The previous weekend an IDF strike killed more than 30. The United Nations estimates about 85 percent of all schools in Gaza have been directly hit or damaged.

The statistics are overwhelming, and in some ways, make it difficult to fully capture the hopelessness and despair and exhaustion in Gaza. Close to 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in IDF attacks, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Oweis said he did not speak to a single person who had not lost a family member in the war. 

The day-to-day of survival is grafted onto this unfathomable violence. Almost all of Gaza’s population – 96 percent – are food insecure. About 40 people have died of malnutrition in Gaza, with 3,000 malnourished children at risk. The fishing sector has been wiped out, and more than half of Gaza’s farmlands have been destroyed by Israeli attacks. Humanitarian groups said they are particularly concerned about the situation in the north of Gaza. Jafari said people there have not had fresh food for months. 

Humanitarian aid, even if it were free-flowing, merely forestalls disaster. It does not solve the catastrophe. A ceasefire and an end to the conflict are the only solutions. “It’s a man-made crisis,” Jafari said. “It is not a natural crisis. It is a man made crisis, which means that it could be overcome and it could be addressed if there is a political will to end the war.”

Or at least this dire phase of it. The long-term consequences of hunger, of disease, of trauma, are still unknown. “We worry about what’s gonna happen now. We worry what’s going to happen the day after,” Bayram said. “This is a society torn to pieces by this conflict.”