LONDON: Israel is using access to water as a weapon of war and a tool of collective punishment against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, Medecins Sans Frontieres has said in a new report. The aid group and other organizations have also given warning that families face dehydration and disease.
Meanwhile, small children haul water containers nearly as heavy as themselves over long distances from distribution points run by nongovernmental organizations — in freezing cold and scorching heat — still unable to meet even a fraction of their families’ need for clean water.
In an April 28 report, MSF documented how Israeli authorities have been deliberately depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water as an “integral part of Israel’s genocide.”
“Israeli authorities know that without water, life ends,” said Claire San Filippo, MSF emergency manager. “Yet they have deliberately and systematically obliterated water infrastructure in Gaza, while consistently blocking water-related supplies from entering.”
The scale of the crisis, however, is stark. About 96 percent of households in the embattled Palestinian enclave lack access to adequate quantities of safe, clean water, the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said on April 27.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza following a Hamas attack, at least 85 percent of the territory’s water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to UN figures.
Even facilities still operating are running at sharply reduced capacity due to fuel shortages, with electricity and critical supplies cut or restricted since October 2023.
“The current water situation in the Gaza Strip is extremely dangerous,” said Dr. Salwa Al-Tibi, country director for US-based charity MedGlobal in Gaza.
“Extensive destruction of infrastructure and contamination of groundwater have left more than 90 percent of available water unfit for human consumption,” Al-Tibi told Arab News.
“In many areas, daily access has dropped to only 3 to 5 liters per person, far below the minimum international standard.”
A Palestinian man, Mohammed al-Hasanat, fills water containers in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, April 24, 2026. (Reuters)
The UN defines the human right to water as access to enough safe, acceptable and affordable water for personal and domestic uses — between 50 and 100 liters per person per day.
Under that standard, the water source should be within 1,000 meters of the home, collection time should not exceed 30 minutes and cost should not be more than 3 percent of household income.In emergencies, the World Health Organization sets the floor at 7.5 to 15 liters.
But in Gaza, fetching even a much smaller amount can be deadly.
“Palestinians have been injured and killed simply trying to access water,” San Filippo said in a statement.
She warned that “this deprivation, combined with dire living conditions, extreme overcrowding, and a collapsed health system, create a perfect storm for the spread of diseases.”
The crisis has been worsened by the increasingly fragmented geography of Gaza. (Reuters)
MSF teams have documented Israeli forces shooting at clearly identified water trucks and destroying boreholes serving tens of thousands. The group highlighted that violent incidents have often occurred during distribution, wounding civilians and aid workers, and damaging equipment.
Hanan, a Palestinian woman in Gaza City, told MSF that her grandson was killed by Israeli soldiers in July 2025 in Nuseirat while standing in line for drinking water.“He was standing in line with other kids, and they (the Israeli forces) killed him,” she said. “He was 10 years old … Getting water is not supposed to be dangerous.”
Israel’s Defense Ministry body overseeing Palestinian civilian affairs, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, rejected MSF’s findings as “baseless claims.”
In posts on X, COGAT said “water supply in Gaza consistently exceeds humanitarian thresholds.”
MSF is the second largest producer and one of the main distributors of drinking water in Gaza after local authorities. From May to November 2025, one in every five of the organization’s water distributions ran dry because trucks could not carry enough for everyone who needed it.
People fill up water containers from a mobile cistern in the Maghazi camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on February 11, 2026. (AFP)
The organization said that Israeli displacement orders in Gaza have “locked our teams out of areas where we had provided water to hundreds of thousands of people, leading to essential services stopping and the loss of lifesaving infrastructure.”
The crisis has been worsened by the increasingly fragmented geography of Gaza, which is now effectively carved up into multiple zones shaped by Israeli military corridors, buffer areas and repeated evacuation orders.
These have divided much of the enclave into disconnected areas, separating northern Gaza from central and southern districts. Hamas, although significantly weakened, continues to retain pockets of influence and armed presence in parts of Gaza City, central Gaza and Khan Younis.
The result is a shattered and overcrowded territory where civilians are trapped between shifting front lines, collapsing infrastructure and growing shortages of food, water and medical care.
Videos circulating on social media capture the desperation; frail, malnourished children hauling large jerrycans across scorched ground in all weather, many barefoot.
BBC cameraman Mustafa Khabeisa shared footage on March 27 on Instagram of a boy of about 6 or 7, alone, carrying two heavy jerrycans — taking a few steps before stopping to rest.
Social media videos show frail, malnourished children hauling large jerrycans across scorched ground in all weather, many barefoot. (Reuters)
Another video, uploaded on April 29, showed a barefoot little girl using all her strength to drag two barrels of water, stumbling as she went, while other children waited nearby for their share from a truck.
“Families are forced to rely on trucked or partially treated water, while humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam, MSF and other organizations are working to provide emergency supplies,” Al-Tibi said.Gaza has extremely limited freshwater supplies, and much of its remaining groundwater is contaminated.
By late 2024, nearly 73 percent of drinking water samples and more than 97 percent of domestic water samples failed minimum chlorination standards, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
In some areas, trucks deliver water just once a week. This moment has taken on an almost ritualistic significance for families with no other reliable source.
Maysa Yousef, an artist and mother of four in central Gaza, described the frantic routine that delivery triggers.
Scarcity of clean water and cleaning products has fueled an explosion of pests like rats, mice and insects. (AFP)
“There’s no water, so when the municipality announces that there will be water in our area that day, we rush to fill whatever containers we have — bowls, buckets, jerrycans, anything,” Yousef told Arab News.
“We prepare everything and wait for the water truck to come,” Yousef said. “When it finally comes, it feels like a celebration, because it only comes once a week.”Children, she said, are often sent first to fetch drinking water, then saline water for washing and bathing. “Look at how much they are carrying, far more than they should.”
The scarcity of clean water and cleaning products has also fueled an explosion of pests. Rats, mice and insects have swarmed displacement sites across Gaza as temperatures rise. With the hottest months still ahead, infestations are expected to worsen without intervention.
“Now in the summer, we have weasels and rats spreading everywhere, causing disease outbreaks,” Yousef said.
“The droppings of weasels and rats are everywhere,” she added. “They have begun mixing with the already unsafe water we use. Even the drinking water is contaminated.
A girl fills a container with water at a makeshift camp for displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip on April 10, 2026. (AFP)
“There are days when I refuse to drink it, but then I’m forced to. Sometimes you can clearly see green algae in it.”
The rodents’ waste, she explained, seeps into pools of standing water, which then contaminates the groundwater. “Israel is refusing to allow in any products to get rid of (the rodents), so people have started inventing homemade rat traps,” Yousef said.On May 1, Save the Children warned that growing rodent and insect infestations were increasing health risks for about 1.4 million people in overcrowded displacement sites.
Israel’s campaign has uprooted nearly all of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million, with very few families still living among the rubble of their homes.
OCHA found that in excess of 80 percent of more than 1,600 displacement sites assessed in mid-April reported rodents or pests; skin infections or rashes appeared at nearly two-thirds of sites, lice at over 65 percent; and bedbugs at more than half.
An estimated 680,000 children are living in these conditions.
An estimated 680,000 children are living in sites with rodents or pests. (AFP)
Summer also means lice, with infrequent bathing allowing it to spread rapidly, especially amid severe water shortages and scarce soap and shampoo.
“When summer comes, that means lice will spread across all of Gaza, just like last summer, when it spread like an epidemic,” Yousef said. “Even in my household, although we didn’t mix with anyone, yet somehow we contracted lice because it became an outbreak and spread everywhere due to the lack of water.”Last summer, some women resorted to shaving their heads as maintaining hygiene became nearly impossible.
“We love our hair, but we had no other choice,” said Umm Samir, a Gaza mother of three teenage girls. “We couldn’t wash it regularly; there was no shampoo and lice had spread rapidly.”
The public-health consequences are mounting.
MedGlobal’s Al-Tibi warned that the “the collapse of the water system poses a direct threat to public health, with rising cases of waterborne diseases and serious risks to food security.”
Children wait to fill containers with water at the Nuseirat camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on May 7, 2026. (AFP)
An MSF survey found nearly one in four people interviewed between May and August 2025 had suffered from diarrhea in the preceding month. In MSF primary healthcare centers, the majority of affected patients were children under 15.
MSF noted in its April 28 statement that access to basic hygiene items, including clean water, soap, diapers and menstrual hygiene products, had become “extremely difficult.”The organization said that “people are forced to dig holes in the sand as toilets, which flood and contaminate the surroundings and groundwater with feces and could lead to outbreaks of waterborne diseases.”
That contamination, combined with overcrowded tents and makeshift shelters, is driving the spread of respiratory infections, skin diseases and diarrheal illnesses.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, warned on May 5 of an imminent public health crisis as skin diseases spread in crowded camps.
The number of skin infections has “tripled in recent months, with rising temperatures, overcrowding and worsening sanitation creating breeding grounds for scabies, chickenpox and other diseases, particularly among children,” UNRWA said.
A drone view shows damaged and destroyed buildings, destroyed in the Israeli military offensive, in the southern Gaza Strip January 24, 2025. (Reuters)
The situation is further complicated by an Israeli blockade. Israel maintains control over key strategic routes, border areas, airspace and much of the territory’s movement, while military operations and restrictions have severely limited civilian mobility and humanitarian access.
Although a ceasefire has been in effect since October 2025, Israel has continued to strike the territory and reportedly restricted the import of essential medical equipment. Both the Israeli military and Hamas have accused each other of violating the truce.
MSF has called on Israeli authorities to “immediately restore water for people at the required levels in Gaza” and urged Israel’s allies to “use their leverage to pressure Israel to stop impeding humanitarian access, including water infrastructure needs.”
For now, Gaza continues to go thirsty. As international calls mount and aid organizations stretch their resources thin, more than two million people remain cut off from one of the most basic conditions for a dignified life — waiting for a water truck that comes once a week, or not at all.
