The water crisis has started early this year in the Palestinian Territories. In scores of towns and villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, people listen eagerly for the gurgle of water in pipelines, and turn on their taps, watching anxiously for the first drops to appear. Others watch and wait for the arrival of water tankers, transporting the life-giving liquid to them from distant sources across an obstacle course of roadblocks, checkpoints and military closures put in place by the Israeli authorities, an inherent feature of their ongoing military occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian Territories. The truth is that until Palestinian water rights are recognised and protected, and until restrictions on Palestinian development are lifted, every year Palestinians will learn to know the colour of water all too well, to feel the throat-cracking pinch of thirst, and to fear for the viability of their future as they feel thirst in a crisis that has been created for them by their occupiers. For as long as the Israeli government is allowed, by the people of Israel and by the international community, to value the welfare of Jews over that of Arabs and to value the profit from its agricultural sector over the human rights of Palestinians, this blatant injustice, this denial of water, that most fundamental of life-giving resources, the pre-requisite for realising all other human rights, will go on.
Md Ziyaullah Khan
Pune, Maharashtra