3 min read
I think, maybe, it’s time to tell our ally to knock this shit off. From TheGuardian:
Israeli forces in Gaza killed a water engineer and two drivers who transported water to displaced families over four days in mid-April, exacerbating severe shortages of clean water that are fueling the spread of preventable disease. Israeli limits on the shipment of soap, washing powder and other hygiene products into Gaza have also forced prices up, adding to the challenge of keeping clean and avoiding infection in overcrowded shelters and tent encampments.Over more than two and a half years of war, Israeli attacks have destroyed most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including networks that provided clean water and removed and treated sewage. They have also repeatedly killed Palestinian civilians trying to maintain or restore them.‘‘Since the beginning of the war, we have lost about 19 workers from water facilities who were carrying out repair and distribution work,” said Omar Shatat, the deputy director of Gaza’s coastal municipalities water utility. “Targeting has become part of the operational reality.’’
“Operational reality” is a phrase with sand in its mouth.
There is no reason to demolish a population’s water supply except to make the land unlivable for that population. When said population lives in a reclaimed desert, that simple fact takes on a rather brutal edge.
The most recent attack was a strike on al-Zein well in northern Gaza last Monday, when water engineers were working inside. The attack killed one, injured four, and caused extensive structural damage to “a critical water source serving the surrounding population”, according to an incident report seen by the Guardian. The document warned that the disruption to water supplies would affect thousands of people.Four days earlier, Israeli forces shot dead two drivers working for Unicef, the UN agency for children, at the main water collection point for northern Gaza. Two others were injured in the attack, which Unicef said threatened the humanitarian networks bringing clean water to hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza.
Thirst. Disease. And it’s even worse when the job of cruelty gets subcontracted. From CNN:
This is the threat faced by those who work in the Ein Samia pumping station in the occupied West Bank, said Mohammad Abu Ayyash, water operations director at the Jerusalem Water Undertaking, a regional public water utility, as he recounted the story of the attack to CNN. The station, northeast of Ramallah, is a vital water hub, supplying around 100,000 Palestinians across more than 20 communities. It’s also become a target for attacks by extremist Israeli settlers. Since the beginning of the year, Ayyash said they have attacked Ein Samia at least 10 times. The day CNN was there in late February, two weeks after the attack, two settlers pulled up in an ATV and started filming on their cell phones. They’d spotted our rental car; it wasn’t safe to stay there too long, Ayyash warned.Taps can run dry for hours or days at a time, while farm animals and crops suffer—water was off for 12 hours after the February attack at Ein Samia, Ayyash said. It’s a devastating additional pressure for a region that is already water scarce, prone to droughts and heat waves that are worsening as the climate crisis escalates.
Not to be indelicate, but allowing local goons to run riot against people you despise anyway is how we got the Sabra-Shatila massacres in 1982. Also, local anti-Semitic militias—the Iron Guard in Romania, the Arrow Cross in Hungary—played a vital role in the Holocaust. And speaking for the rest of the world, the work of those clever Chinese climate hoaxsters has made using water as a weapon of war more of an atrocity even that it used to be. Cruelty as the point always has had an international flavor.
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