In the Jordan Valley in midsummer, the temperature regularly pushes past 40°C. Farmers there have described rationing the water they use to wash their hands so there is enough left to keep livestock alive. A few kilometers away, in an Israeli settlement, swimming pools are filled and garden sprinklers run on timers. This is not a coincidence of geography or rainfall. It is the product of a legal and administrative architecture that has governed water in the occupied West Bank for more than five decades.
The Numbers Behind Palestinian Water Access and Settler Consumption
The figures are stark and consistent across multiple monitoring bodies. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA oPt) and the Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene group (EWASH) — a coalition of more than 25 humanitarian organizations operating in the occupied Palestinian territory — have documented Palestinian per capita water consumption in the West Bank at approximately 73 liters per person per day. In some rural and Area C communities the figure falls considerably lower, to between 20 and 50 liters.
The World Health Organization’s minimum threshold for basic needs — drinking, cooking, basic hygiene — is 100 liters per person per day. Palestinians in the West Bank fall below that floor as a matter of routine, not exception.
Israeli settlers living in the same territory consume an estimated 300 liters or more per person per day, a figure documented by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, in its detailed reporting on water policy in the West Bank. Some assessments place settler consumption higher still, when agricultural use tied to settlement enterprises is factored in. The ratio — roughly four to one in favor of settlers, on the same land, drawing from the same underlying aquifer — is not explained by differing needs. It is explained by differing rights.
How the Mountain Aquifer Was Divided
Beneath the West Bank sits the Mountain Aquifer, the primary freshwater source for both Palestinians and Israelis west of the Jordan River. It is composed of three basins — the Western, Northeastern, and Eastern — and it is, by any hydrological measure, a shared resource. The question of who controls how it is shared has been answered almost entirely in Israel’s favor.
Under the Oslo II Interim Agreement of 1995, water allocations in the West Bank were formalized in Annex III and its related protocols. The agreement acknowledged Palestinian water rights “in principle” while deferring their full resolution to final-status negotiations — negotiations that have not meaningfully occurred in more than two decades. In the interim, the arrangement left Israel drawing an estimated 80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer’s annual yield. Palestinians were allocated roughly 20 percent of a resource that lies primarily beneath their land.
B’Tselem’s reporting, as well as research published by the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), has documented that Palestinian extraction from the aquifer is subject to strict licensing requirements administered by the Joint Water Committee — a body in which Israel holds effective veto power. Palestinian applications for new wells, or to increase extraction from existing ones, have been routinely denied or left unresolved for years. Meanwhile, Israeli extraction has continued at its allocated levels and, according to some monitoring data, beyond them.
Mekorot, the Pipe Network, and Who Gets Served First
The practical distribution of water across the West Bank runs largely through Mekorot, Israel’s national water company. Mekorot operates the main transmission infrastructure and supplies water both to Israeli settlements and, on a secondary basis, to Palestinian municipalities through the Palestinian Water Authority.
The structural problem is in the sequencing. During periods of high demand — summer months, droughts, periods of reduced aquifer recharge — Mekorot has consistently reduced supply to Palestinian communities while maintaining supply to settlements. B’Tselem documented this pattern in detail in its 2016 report Crowding Out: Israel’s Discrimination Against Palestinians in the West Bank Through Water, finding that Palestinian communities experienced systematic supply cuts that Israeli consumers in the same region did not.
EWASH and OCHA have similarly recorded seasonal shortfalls. In summer months, some Palestinian villages in the northern West Bank receive piped water for only a few hours every several days. Families store water in rooftop tanks — the grey and black plastic containers visible on nearly every Palestinian home are a direct consequence of supply unreliability — and purchase additional water from private tankers at prices that can reach four to ten times the rate paid by households with reliable piped connections.
Area C, Demolitions, and the Denial of Infrastructure
Approximately 60 percent of the West Bank is classified as Area C, under full Israeli civil and military control. The vast majority of Palestinian communities in Area C lack connection to a piped water network, and Israeli authorities have imposed severe restrictions on the construction of water infrastructure — wells, cisterns, pipelines — in these areas.
B’Tselem and the humanitarian organization Oxfam have documented hundreds of cases in which Palestinian water structures in Area C — including EU-funded cisterns and small-scale irrigation systems — were demolished by Israeli authorities on the grounds that they lacked the permits that Israeli policy makes almost impossible to obtain. A 2012 World Bank report, West Bank and Gaza: Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development, found that Israeli permit restrictions were the single largest obstacle to Palestinian water sector development, exceeding even the physical constraints of geography and aquifer recharge rates.
The effect is circular and deliberate in its architecture: Palestinians cannot build infrastructure without permits, permits are systematically denied, and the resulting underdevelopment is then cited as evidence that Palestinian water demand is lower than Israeli demand — which is used to justify the existing allocation.
A Legal Framework Built on Dispossession
Shortly after occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israeli military authorities issued Military Order 92, transferring control over all water resources in the territory to Israeli military commanders. Military Order 158, issued the same year, prohibited Palestinians from constructing any new water infrastructure without a permit from those same commanders. These orders, documented extensively by Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization, and by international legal scholars including Noura Erakat in her work Justice for Some, established the legal foundation for the disparity that persists today.
The Fourth Geneva Convention, which applies to the West Bank as occupied territory under international humanitarian law, obliges an occupying power to ensure the population under occupation has access to essential resources. The ICRC and multiple UN human rights bodies have stated that Israel’s water policies in the West Bank are inconsistent with these obligations. Those statements have not changed the allocation. The pipes still run where they have always run.
Sources
- B’Tselem, Crowding Out: Israel’s Discrimination Against Palestinians in the West Bank Through Water (2016), btselem.org/water
- OCHA oPt, Humanitarian Fact Sheets on Water and Sanitation in the West Bank, various years, ochaopt.org
- EWASH (Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene group), advocacy and monitoring reports, ewashsop.org
- World Bank, West Bank and Gaza: Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development (2012)
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- Al-Haq, documentation of Military Orders 92 and 158 and their application, alhaq.org
- Oslo II Interim Agreement, Annex III and Water Protocol (1995)
- ICRC, International Humanitarian Law and the Challenges of Contemporary Armed Conflicts; ICRC statements on occupation and essential resources
- Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), water and natural resources monitoring data, arij.org
- World Health Organization, Minimum Water Quantity Needed for Domestic Uses, Emergency guidelines
