A significant drop in per capita water availability has turned daily survival in Gaza’s al-Mawasi camp into a five-hour ordeal of queues, jerrycans, and contaminated saltwater that families have no choice but to drink.
The crisis sharpened after Eta, a company that had provided clean water to displaced Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, ceased operations due to a lack of funding, cutting off truck deliveries that had been a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of people sheltering in tents along the southern coast.
Five Hours for Two Jerrycans
Nawaf al-Akhras, a father of seven displaced from Rafah two years ago, called the daily water run “torment.” He and his eldest son walk roughly one and a half kilometers to a filling station where thousands of people crowd under the sun, competing for a trickle of supply.
They spend entire days in line. People converge from across the camp, some from even farther, all funneling toward the same inadequate source.
He can barely fill two small jerrycans per trip. That is not enough for his family. They ration even drinking water.
“We survived hunger,” Nawaf told Al Jazeera. “Now we face thirst.”
The arrival of summer looms over the camp. Tents offer no insulation against heat that is already extreme and will only worsen. Without water truck deliveries and with temperatures climbing, residents expect the situation to deteriorate rapidly.
A Safe Zone That Was Never Safe
Al-Mawasi sits along the western coast of Khan Younis. Before the war, it was a sparsely populated agricultural strip home to a few thousand people. After Israeli forces designated it a so-called “safe zone,” hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians flowed in, transforming it into one of the most densely packed areas in the Gaza Strip.
The infrastructure was never built to support that population. There are no sewage networks adequate for the density. No water mains scaled for the demand. Tents stretch across sand in rows so tight that movement between them is difficult. The designation as a safe zone did not come with the resources to make it habitable, and the area has itself come under attack.
Salah Barhoush, a camp resident and participant in protests that erupted in early April, told Al Jazeera that his displaced family of 13 has been forced to buy brackish water with dangerously high salt content for drinking, cooking, and daily use — water that would never be considered safe for human consumption under normal circumstances.
“The children get sick constantly,” Barhoush said, describing how contaminated water has become the camp’s only option. He has four children, and he fears for all of them. Illness from waterborne contaminants is now routine among the youngest residents of al-Mawasi.
Destruction by the Numbers
The Palestinian Water Authority has confirmed that Israeli attacks have destroyed a substantial portion of water wells in some areas of Gaza, crippling the sector’s capacity to produce and distribute water.
Per capita water availability has fallen dramatically since the war began. Total available water across Gaza now stands at a fraction of pre-war levels. Even that diminished supply is unstable, dependent on fuel that Israel restricts from entering the Strip.
Gaza’s water system relies primarily on groundwater sources, according to the Palestinian Water Authority. Without fuel to run pumps and treatment facilities, wells that survived the bombing sit idle. Repair crews cannot obtain the equipment they need because of blockade restrictions on materials Israel deems dual-use.
The pattern is compounding. Infrastructure is destroyed. Fuel to operate what remains is blocked. Parts needed for repair are denied entry. Each layer of restriction tightens the same vise.
UN Experts Characterize Crisis
UN human rights experts have characterized what is happening as something beyond the collateral consequences of war. In a letter published in July 2025, they argued that the water crisis was both predictable and predicted — and that thirst was being used as a weapon in Gaza.
The experts wrote that Israel’s blockade and infrastructure destruction had displaced most of Gaza’s two million residents and left them without access to minimum vital drinking water.
They went further, framing the crisis as deliberate policy rather than battlefield accident. The cutting of water and food supplies, they wrote, constituted a silent but deadly threat. The issue was not limited to infrastructure destruction but extended to the sustained restriction of supplies, fuel, and maintenance access.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor echoed the alarm, stating that the lack of clean drinking water has become a critical threat to civilian lives in Gaza.
These are not new warnings. International organizations have been documenting the trajectory of water infrastructure destruction for months. What has changed is the vocabulary. The language has shifted from “humanitarian emergency” to “weaponization.”
Water as Instrument of Control
When a population cannot access water independently, every aspect of daily life becomes contingent on whoever controls the supply. People cannot stay in place without it. They cannot leave without knowing where they will find it next. Five-hour queues restructure entire days around a single resource. Families stop doing everything else.
This dynamic is visible across conflict zones where water access has been weaponized, from IS-held Raqqa to drought-stricken regions where scarcity becomes a lever of power. The mechanism is similar even when the context differs: make water hard enough to get, and you control the population that needs it.
In al-Mawasi, protests in early April revealed the breaking point. Displaced Palestinians gathered to demand that international institutions and local authorities intervene, calling access to clean water a fundamental human right and stressing the urgent need to save children and the elderly.
The protests were specific in their demands. Not grand political settlements. Water. Now.
What Comes Next
Summer will test what remains of Gaza’s water supply in ways that the current spring conditions only hint at. Higher temperatures mean higher water demand, faster dehydration, more rapid spread of waterborne illness. The collapse of Gaza’s broader infrastructure has already created secondary crises in sanitation and pest control that contaminated water will accelerate.
Without fuel, functioning wells cannot operate. Without parts, damaged infrastructure cannot be repaired. Without funding, companies like Eta cannot resume deliveries. Each of these bottlenecks requires a different actor to act, and none of them currently is.
The exhaustion of Gaza’s civilian population is compounding. People who have been displaced multiple times, who have survived bombing and hunger, now face a threat that is quieter but no less lethal. Dehydration kills more slowly than an airstrike, but it kills with the same certainty.
Nawaf al-Akhras, standing in a queue he will join again tomorrow and the day after, put it plainly. Two jerrycans. Five hours. Seven mouths. The math does not work, and everyone involved knows it.
The question the international community faces is whether water denial in Gaza will be treated as what UN experts have already called it, a weapon, or whether it will continue to be discussed in the softer language of humanitarian concern while people die of thirst in a place they were told would be safe.
Photo by Saravanan Narayanan on Pexels