8 April 2011

He'll grow up



For "stealing" water. On that topic:

Amnesty:


"The 450,000 Israeli settlers, who live in the West Bank in violation of international law, use as much or more water than the Palestinian population of some 2.3 million...

"As well, most of the water from Wadi Gaza, a stream and surface water source which originates in the Hebron mountains in the West Bank and then flows south-east through Israel and into Gaza, is diverted into a dam in Israel, just before it reaches Gaza...

The yearly sustainable yield of the Coastal Aquifer in Gaza, some 55 MCM, falls far short of the population’s needs. Israel does not allow the transfer of water from the Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank to Gaza. (In any case, such transfers would be feasible only if Israel allowed the Palestinian population of the West Bank access to a more equitable share of the Mountain Aquifer, as the current allocation is not sufficient to meet even their own needs.)

With no other source of water available to them, Palestinians in Gaza have long resorted to over-extraction from the Coastal Aquifer, by as much as 80-100 MCM/Y – a rate equivalent to twice the aquifer’s yearly sustainable yield.34 The result has been a marked, progressive deterioration in the quality of the water supply, already contaminated by decades of sewage infiltration into the aquifer. Today some 90-95 per cent of Gaza’s water is polluted and unfit for human consumption."


Human Rights Watch:

"Israeli authorities have controlled West Bank water resources since they seized the land from Jordan in 1967, and continue to control completely all Palestinian access to water resources in the West Bank, including in Areas A, B and C. Israel provides Jewish settlers with access to water for domestic and agricultural use that it denies Palestinians...

Average Israeli per capita consumption of water—including water consumption by settlers—is 4.3 times that of Palestinians in the occupied territories (including Gaza), according to the World Health Organization. In the Jordan Valley, an estimated 9,000 settlers in Israeli agricultural settlements use one-quarter the total amount of water consumed by the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank, some 2.5 million people."

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