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Gaza’s Water Crisis: Aquifer Contamination, Desalination, and the Daily Search for Clean Water

Before the bombs, before the blackouts, before the displacement of more than a million people into tent cities along the southern coast, Gaza’s water was already failing its people. The aquifer beneath the Strip — the sole natural freshwater source for more than two million residents — had been deteriorating for decades, quietly poisoned by over-extraction, seawater intrusion, and the infiltration of untreated sewage. By the eve of the October 2023 war, 97 percent of groundwater pumped from Gaza’s coastal aquifer did not meet World Health Organization drinking-water standards, according to UNICEF. That figure was not a projection or a warning. It was the baseline. The crisis existed long before it became catastrophic.

The Slow Collapse of the Gaza Coastal Aquifer

The Gaza coastal aquifer is a shallow, sandy formation stretching beneath the Strip and into Israeli and Egyptian territory. For generations it was the foundation of Palestinian life in Gaza — irrigating citrus groves, supplying households, sustaining a dense and largely self-sufficient agricultural economy. That economy was largely destroyed after 1948, when the majority of Gaza’s current population arrived as refugees from depopulated villages across what became Israel. The aquifer’s problems accelerated alongside Gaza’s population, which grew from roughly 80,000 in 1948 to over 2.3 million by the early 2020s, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).

The core problem is hydrological. The aquifer’s sustainable annual yield — the amount that can be extracted without long-term damage — is estimated at between 55 and 60 million cubic metres per year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). For years, extraction has exceeded that threshold by a factor of two or more. As freshwater is drawn out faster than rainfall can replenish it, seawater from the Mediterranean migrates inland, raising chloride and salinity levels far beyond safe limits. Meanwhile, Gaza’s chronically underfunded sewage infrastructure leaks nitrates into the same formation. A 2012 UN report warned that the aquifer could become “unusable” by 2016. That deadline passed; the degradation continued.

UNICEF documented chloride concentrations in Gaza groundwater reaching up to ten times the WHO guideline of 250 milligrams per litre, and nitrate concentrations — a marker strongly associated with infant methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby syndrome” — regularly exceeding the WHO limit of 50 milligrams per litre. The communities most exposed to the highest nitrate levels were, predictably, in the most overcrowded and under-served refugee camp areas.

Desalination: A Lifeline Tied to the Grid

Gaza’s answer to the aquifer’s collapse was desalination — specifically, three main municipal desalination plants built along the coast, supplemented by a patchwork of smaller private units. At full capacity before the 2023 war, the large plants could produce roughly 100,000 cubic metres of potable water per day, enough to supply a significant portion, though not all, of Gaza’s needs at minimum humanitarian standards.

But desalination is an energy-intensive process, and energy is precisely what Gaza has never had in reliable supply. The Gaza Power Plant — the Strip’s only electricity-generating station — operated on a diet of fuel that Israel controlled entry of through its blockade, which has been in place since 2007. Throughout the 2010s, Gazans typically received between four and twelve hours of electricity per day. The Palestinian Energy Authority, OCHA, and multiple human rights organisations documented how each escalation in the blockade or each military operation translated almost immediately into reduced fuel, reduced generation, reduced desalination, and reduced safe water. The infrastructure was engineered to depend on a supply chain that was, by deliberate policy, unreliable.

When electricity cuts hit, water pumping stations also failed. OCHA’s periodic situation reports throughout the 2010s and early 2020s described a recurring cycle: conflict or fuel shortage → power cut → pump failure → sewage overflow → groundwater contamination → disease risk. It was a loop that Israeli authorities, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas governance, and the international donor community all acknowledged and none fully resolved.

Disease, Diarrhea, and What the WHO Numbers Show

The public health consequences of contaminated water are well documented and deeply ordinary in their cruelty. WHO surveillance in Gaza tracked elevated rates of diarrheal disease — particularly in children under five — that correlated with periods of infrastructure failure. UNICEF noted that waterborne illness was among the leading causes of preventable child morbidity in the Strip. Hepatitis A outbreaks were reported across multiple years. Skin conditions linked to bathing in contaminated water were routine clinical presentations in Gaza’s overwhelmed primary care system.

The WHO’s Health Cluster reported in the years before October 2023 that Gaza’s wastewater treatment capacity was functioning at a fraction of its design capacity, with tens of millions of litres of partially treated or raw sewage discharged into the Mediterranean each day — sewage that then threatened coastal water sources and fishing grounds that families depended on for food and income.

For ordinary families, the practical reality was a constant, expensive calculation. Water sold by private vendors — often of uncertain quality drawn from shallow wells or inadequately maintained desalination units — could cost many times the price of piped water in cities with functioning infrastructure. Families in Jabalia refugee camp or Khan Younis might spend a disproportionate share of their income on water that was still not reliably safe. OCHA documented water access in Gaza at well below the Sphere humanitarian standard of 15 litres per person per day even in pre-war periods of relative calm.

The Blockade as Water Policy

The connection between Gaza’s political situation and its water crisis is not incidental — it is structural. Gisha, the Israeli legal centre focused on freedom of movement, and Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organisation, have both documented how the blockade’s restrictions on construction materials delayed or prevented the rehabilitation of water and sanitation infrastructure for years. Pipes, pumps, chlorination equipment, and generators designated for water projects were repeatedly delayed or denied entry as dual-use items under Israeli military policy.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) characterised Gaza’s economic situation as one of “de-development” — a deliberate retrogression of productive capacity under closure conditions. Water infrastructure fits precisely within that frame. What might be constructed or repaired in months was deferred for years. What degraded was not replaced. The international donor community poured funds into projects that were physically blocked from completion or that were destroyed in successive military operations and had to be rebuilt from the beginning.

Scholars including Sara Roy, whose foundational work on Gaza’s political economy documented the de-development process from the 1980s onward, and legal analysts like Noura Erakat, who has situated Gaza’s infrastructure crisis within the framework of international humanitarian law obligations on the occupying power, have both argued that the water crisis cannot be understood outside the political architecture that sustains it.

After October 2023: A Crisis Beyond the Baseline

What the October 2023 war did was not create Gaza’s water crisis. It collapsed whatever remained of the systems that had been barely managing it. Within days of the start of Israeli military operations, the Gaza Power Plant halted and the northern desalination plant shut down. UNICEF and OCHA reported that water access in the north fell to as little as one to two litres per person per day at the height of the initial siege — roughly two percent of the Sphere emergency minimum. WHO documented explosive outbreaks of diarrheal disease, respiratory illness, and scabies in displacement sites. Cholera, which Gaza had not seen in decades, became a documented risk.

The baseline of 97 percent unfit groundwater was not a crisis waiting to happen. It was a crisis already happening, to real people, in a place whose suffering had been documented, reported, and not resolved for a generation.

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