[The Editors' Verdict] The Tragedy of Gaza Begins with Groundwater

"Lord, grant me strength just one more time so that I may take revenge on the Philistine who gouged out my eyes."

The story of Samson, the hero of the Israelite people famous for the power residing in his hair, and his death in the Old Testament is drawing renewed attention. This is because the place where he exerted his final mighty strength to collapse the temple of the Philistines and died is coincidentally the very 'Gaza' district where clashes between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas are currently occurring.

On the 7th (local time), a building in the downtown area of Gaza City, the central city of the Gaza Strip in Palestine, was engulfed in flames due to an airstrike by the Israeli military.
[Image source=AP·Yonhap News]

Notably, this time Hamas unusually invaded Israel, occupying part of the border area and even taking residents as prisoners. Israel has mobilized all its forces and conscripted 300,000 reservists, declaring it will launch a scorched-earth operation against the Gaza Strip. The international community fears this could result in a large number of civilian casualties.

Various conspiracy theories are circulating about this conflict, including Iran’s involvement and Israel’s political maneuvers ahead of the U.S. presidential election, but these alone cannot explain the long history of conflict in the Gaza Strip. Looking only at the recent international situation surrounding Palestine, this dispute is easily perceived merely as violent terrorism by Islamic extremist groups.

The international community points to a more fundamental cause of the Gaza Strip conflict: the long-standing dispute over groundwater between Israel and Palestine. Every year on March 22, designated by the United Nations as World Water Day, the groundwater conflict between the Gaza Strip and Israeli settlements is a recurring topic. As Israeli settlements increase, various desalination facilities, pumps, and massive pipelines have been constructed, depriving Palestinian residents of their vital water resources.

Especially since the 2000s, due to global warming, the water levels of Israel’s main water sources?the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, and the Dead Sea?have sharply declined, intensifying clashes between the two sides. The conflict between Israel and Hamas has deepened over the vast groundwater aquifer extending from the Gaza Strip to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Israel has continued to expand its desalination facilities while persistently destroying desalination plants installed in the Gaza Strip through airstrikes, intensifying efforts to secure groundwater. It is no coincidence that desalination facilities are concentrated in Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, which faces both the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula.

Amid these circumstances, the population of the Gaza Strip has also surged, bringing the water dispute to the surface. During the 1970s’ Fourth Middle East War, the Gaza Strip’s population was about 400,000; now it has ballooned to 2.4 million, a sixfold increase over the past 50 years. A desert city roughly the size of Sejong City in South Korea has grown into a metropolis of over two million, making the drinking water issue a massive social problem. The average daily water consumption per person in the Gaza Strip is about 88 liters, falling short of the UN’s recommended minimum of 100 liters.

Ultimately, this extreme water shortage has made Hamas and other hardline armed factions in the Gaza Strip more aggressive, causing periodic conflicts. No matter what mediation efforts the U.S. and the international community undertake, it will be difficult to break the chronic cycle of conflict without first resolving the fiercely contested water issue underground.