In Gaza, water is no longer life. It has become like a transparent bullet, entering the body quietly and killing it slowly. The cup that a child raises to his lips may carry delayed death inside it.

Gaza: where water is now a rare commodity

In every home, there is a story of thirst. Mothers distribute a few drops to their children as if it were a rare medicine.

A child wakes up at night screaming “Mama… I’m thirsty,” and the mother finds only salty water (unfit for drinking), so she pours it into the cup with a trembling heart, praying that it will not turn into poison that kills her little one.

During the ongoing war, Israel has taken a series of steps that have turned the water crisis in Gaza into an existential disaster.

The Israeli army bombed the main desalination plants and destroyed distribution lines and pipes, leading to an almost complete halt in water supplies. With fuel imports blocked and electricity cut off, water wells, pumping stations, and desalination plants were disrupted, and the networks stopped working completely, leaving neighborhoods without a drop of water.

Without pumping, salt water seeped into the aquifer, and untreated sewage mixed with the networks after the treatment plants stopped working.

Thus, the little water that remained turned into a salty, polluted mixture, closer to poison than to life, making every sip in Gaza a real possibility of slow death.

Before the war, 97% of Gaza’s water was undrinkable, but today there is no water left to distinguish between what is drinkable and what is not. Doctors are recording alarming figures.

Children are suffering from severe diarrhea, others from liver infections and kidney failure, dehydration is killing the weak, and diseases are spreading as if death were dissolving in every drop.

One and a half million people in Gaza have no clean water. Two-thirds of children go to bed thirsty or drink contaminated water. These are not collateral damages of war, but slow genocide.

Israel does not need missiles to kill

A war fought not with bullets, but with water cuts.

In Gaza, Israel does not need missiles to kill. It is enough to let people raise a cup to their mouths, only to discover that what they thought was life… was death.

Featured image via the Canary