For about 200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, the supply of running water this summer is only once a week, and the municipalities are forced to send water to neighborhoods in rotation. In addition to those, about 400,000 Palestinians are not connected to the water network and are dependent mostly in summer (when the springs and wells run dry) on buying water when it arrives in tanker trucks. Water from trucks is more expensive in summer, because it travels a long distance.
Abd al-Rahman a-Tamimi, who heads the Palestinian hydrolic group, told Haaretz that this year an additional reason has been added for the water crisis: for the past sixteen months, tens of thousands of families have not paid their water bills because of their deteriorating economic situations and the public sector not being paid their salaries. This is after Israel, for the past year, has frozen payments it has collected that are due to be handed over to the Palestinian Authority Treasury for customs duties.
Tamimi says that before the freeze of those funds, 15%-20% were unable to pay their water bills, which prevented the municipalities and village councils from making needed repairs and improvements or to pay the Mekorot Company for the water they supply.
The basic reason for the permanent shortage of water is that despite the natural increase in demand for home use due to the summer heat, the Mekorot Company, from which the Palestinians buy about 51% of their water for home use, does not increase the quota allocated to the Palestinians in the summer.
Israel exploits about 80% of the water from the mountain aquifer, the only source of water serving the Palestinians, and it allocates only the remaining 20% to the Palestinians. The Oslo Agreements left the control of the sources of water in Israel's hands, without making any adjustments to the way the distribution was allocated. The existing division has been in existence since 1967. The agreements permitted the Palestinians to drill new wells in the eastern mountain aquifer, but the additional amount of water cannot keep up with the increased demand of the increased Palestinian population.
Also there are problems of infrastructure that cause a lost of water in the pipes. Since its establishment, the Palestinian Authority has been attempting to improve the shaky infrastructure that it inherited from Israel, and there has been a decrease in the amount of water that is wasted from 42% to 33%. The economic crises of these past few years has also hurt the ability to keep up the maintenance of the existing infrastructure, to modernize it and add more communities to the network.
The yearly average the Palestinian water network supplies in the West Bank is about 220,000 cubic meters a day for houshold use, which means about 99 liters per person ( the minimum needed is about 100 liters). After taking into consideration the quantity per person that is lost in the system, the amount per person is about 67 liters. There are large differences from one region to another: 11% receive less than 20 liters per person; 39% receive between 20-50 liters; 44% receive 50-100 liters, and only 4% receive more than 120 liters.
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