Water in Palestine

Palestinian water is the region's starkest case of scarcity by governance. The resource exists, but access is allocated by an interim agreement, Oslo II of 1995, frozen for three decades. West Bank Palestinians draw a capped share of the shared mountain aquifer and buy a growing share from Israel's Mekorot, while Area C rules constrain wells, networks and even cisterns. Gaza's coastal aquifer was ruined before the current war: over-pumped, sea-invaded, about 97% unfit to drink. The war has since destroyed much of the infrastructure that partially compensated.

The war has pushed Gaza into a category of its own. About 97% of the coastal aquifer’s water already failed WHO standards before 2023. By 2025–26, with networks, pumping stations and desalination plants damaged or destroyed, half of all families had less than six litres per person a day for drinking and cooking at the October 2025 ceasefire, UNICEF found. Post-ceasefire assessments of the water system are ongoing, and rebuilding supply is among the largest humanitarian engineering tasks anywhere.⁷

A quick-reference dashboard for Palestine: headline economy and water indicators³⁵³⁶, water stress against the scarcity thresholds, non-conventional supply, and the institutions behind the sector. The commercial picture, with buyers, deal structures and the project pipeline, is in the market brief.

One interactive map of Palestine's water, built from real geodata. Climate & drought maps the aridity gradient (WorldClim) with warming projections. The WRI Aqueduct layers, covering overall water risk, water stress and flood risk (plus groundwater decline where the trend is significant), shade every river sub-basin by its 0–5 risk score. Demand shows where the population, and the water demand, concentrate. Infrastructure brings the physical system together: rivers, dams (FAO AQUASTAT), treatment plants, desalination and the major conveyors. Hover any sub-basin or marker for detail; sources are cited under each view.

The West Bank and Gaza are two separate landscapes. FAO describes five zones from east to west: the Jordan Valley, the eastern slopes, the central highlands, the semi-coastal region and the coast.² The central highlands run the length of the West Bank at 400–1,000 m.² Their limestone hills act as a porous sponge. They absorb most of the rain, and much of it emerges as springs in the valleys and along the margins of the highlands.² In 1998 the West Bank had 527 springs, but only 114 flowed at 0.1 litres a second or more.² Gaza lies on the coastal plain, above a shallow aquifer that continues from Israel’s coastal aquifer.²

Rainfall

The climate is eastern Mediterranean, with cool, rainy winters, hot, dry summers and 100–700 mm of rain a year.² In the West Bank the eastern slopes receive 150–300 mm. The central highlands get 300 mm in the south and 600 mm in the north, and the semi-coastal zone 400–700 mm.² The Gaza Strip receives 200–400 mm.² Long-term averages are 409 mm a year in the West Bank and 300 mm in Gaza.² Recent years have been drier in Gaza. In 2020 the World Bank reported that average rainfall had fallen by 20–30% over five years, and recharge by 10–20%.⁴ Over a longer span, the national adaptation plan found very low confidence in any rainfall trend over the past 50 years.³

Temperature and the coast

Warm days and nights have become more frequent since 1950.³ Local records differ. Jerusalem warmed by 0.1 °C a decade in 1964–2011 and Jericho by 0.33 °C a decade in 1969–2008. In Gaza, average daily maximum and minimum temperatures fell in 1976–2006.³ Sea level off Gaza is rising by about 1.5 mm a year, which will speed up coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion.³

Projections

The adaptation plan sets out three scenarios against 1986–2005.³ If global warming is held to 2 °C, temperatures rise by about 2 °C by 2090. In a mid-range scenario, warming reaches about 3 °C by 2090 and rainfall falls by about 20%, with more frequent droughts.³ If emissions go unchecked, warming reaches about 4.5 °C and rainfall falls by about 30% by 2090. Even then, the rare wettest days may become more frequent, especially in the West Bank.³

Rainfall and temperature in numbers

Averaged over the whole of Palestine, ERA5 reanalysis gives about 340 mm of rain a year and a mean temperature of 20.2 °C for 1991–2020. About 61% of that rain falls in December, January and February, and 4 months average less than 5 mm. Since 1971 the country has warmed by about 0.44 °C a decade. Average rainfall in 1993–2022 was about 8% lower than in 1951–1980, and single years swing widely around that.

Projected change

Source: World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, retrieved September 2026. ERA5 0.25° reanalysis for the annual series (1950–2022) and the monthly climatology (1991–2020); CMIP6 0.25° multi-model ensemble median for the projections, as change against 1995–2014. These are national averages, which hide the gap between wet highlands and dry interiors, and reanalysis rainfall over deserts carries wide uncertainty.

The mountain aquifer is the prize: high-quality karst water shared with Israel, allocated roughly 80/20 under Oslo's interim tables and unmoved since. Palestinian abstraction is further limited by permits and infrastructure, and purchases from Mekorot, 90.3 MCM in 2020 and rising, fill the gap.⁹ In Gaza, small desalination plants, Israeli connections and donor-run treatment provided a fragile pre-war floor that now lies in ruins. Seawater desalination at scale is the only credible endpoint.

The main rivers

The table ranks the rivers of Palestine by the largest natural flow they reach inside the country. Natural flow is the modelled long-term average before any withdrawals. For a heavily used river it measures what the river could carry, not what arrives today.

Sources: Grill, Lehner, Thieme et al. (2019), Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers, Nature 569, dataset under CC BY 4.0, for length, natural flow (WaterGAP, 1971–2000) and free-flowing status, meaning the share of the river’s length inside Palestine still classed as free-flowing. No flow figure is given below 20 m³/s, where a global model is too coarse to rank small rivers. Dams from the FAO AQUASTAT regional inventories, matched to the nearest river reach, so a dam on a tributary close to a main stem can be counted against the main stem. The same rivers are drawn on the water map above under Rivers & lakes.

Palestinians had 448.4 MCM of water available in 2020, the statistics bureau and water authority report. Wells supplied 299.1 MCM, springs 53.3 MCM and desalination 5.7 MCM.⁹ The remaining 90.3 MCM, a fifth of the total, was bought from Israel’s national water company, Mekorot. Purchases reached 22% of available water in 2021.⁹¹⁰ Palestinians have had no access to the Jordan River since 1967, a resource the same bodies estimate at about 250 MCM a year.⁹

How much reaches a household

Domestic consumption averaged 86.3 litres per person per day in 2021: 89.0 in the West Bank and 82.7 in Gaza. Counting only water fit to drink, Gaza’s share was 21.3 litres.¹⁰ The average Israeli used 247 litres a day in 2020, according to B’Tselem.¹¹ Supply is also irregular. Only 36% of West Bank Palestinians receive running water every day, and 47% have it for fewer than 10 days a month.¹² In the Jordan Valley community of Humsa–Al Baqai’a, residents buy tankered water at NIS 40 per m³, eight times the average West Bank price.¹³

Farming and springs

Springs remain the largest single source of irrigation water for West Bank Palestinians, an OCHA survey found in 2011.¹⁴ In Gaza, nine in ten people relied on desalinated water before 2023. Private vendors produced 81% of it, at 10–30 times the price of piped water. In 2016 only 48 of 154 vendors were licensed and monitored.¹⁵ Gaza’s largest seawater desalination plant, at Deir al Balah, opened in January 2017 with an initial output of 6,000 m³ a day.¹⁶

Withdrawals over time

FAO’s AQUASTAT estimates put Palestine’s freshwater withdrawals at 281 million m³ in 2000 and 335 million m³ in 2021. Agriculture’s share of the total moved from 47% in 2004 to 49% in 2021.

Source: FAO AQUASTAT via the World Bank World Development Indicators, retrieved September 2026. AQUASTAT revises national figures irregularly and fills the years between surveys, so a jump between two adjacent years usually marks a new national estimate rather than a change on the ground.

Before the war, Gaza’s supply rested on groundwater. About 96.2 million m³ a year was pumped from some 306 wells, and about 52,000 m³ a day came through three bulk connections from Israel.⁶ Three short-term desalination plants added about 18,000 m³ a day.⁶ In 2018, 97% of Gazans still relied on private tankers and small informal desalination units for drinking water.¹ A central desalination plant of 55 million m³ a year, expandable to twice that, was planned. A pledging conference in March 2018 raised about EUR 456 million for the plant and its associated works.⁴

West Bank supply

Palestinian wells in the West Bank are 100–150 m deep.² Spring-fed irrigation canals and pools lose about 15 million m³ a year, and many villages still rely on cisterns for household water.² Networks reach most homes. In 2020, 93% of households in the West Bank and Gaza were connected.⁵ Losses are high. The World Bank put non-revenue water at 29% among West Bank service providers and 40% in Gaza.¹

Wastewater

In 2020 sewers reached 73% of Gaza households but only 32% in the West Bank.⁵ In Gaza, 46 million m³ of wastewater a year still went untreated or partly treated into natural drains.⁵ Three new plants were meant to change that. North Gaza, at about 35,600 m³ a day, entered full operation in March 2018, and Khan Younis started in November 2019 at 26,800 m³ a day.⁵ With a third plant at Al-Bureij, they could treat 74% of the wastewater collected in Gaza.⁵ In the West Bank, FAO found in 2008 that none of the few treatment plants worked properly.²

War damage in Gaza

Two years of war wrecked the system. An EU, UN and World Bank assessment released in April 2026 put damage to water, sanitation and hygiene at US$1.7 billion, with losses of US$675.3 million.⁶ Recovery needs reach US$4.24 billion.⁶ About 88% of above-ground assets and 76% of underground networks were partly or fully damaged.⁶ All six wastewater treatment plants were out of action, and 70% of sewage pumping stations were inoperable.⁶ One of the three main desalination plants and two of the three bulk connections were not working, and about 77% of households relied on water trucking.⁶ Before the war, about 81% of Gazans had access to safely managed water.⁶ Reconstruction plans put desalination, wastewater reuse and aquifer recharge first.⁶

The asset base in numbers

Sources: FAO AQUASTAT regional dam inventories (CC BY 4.0), which list large dams with a published capacity and can lag recent construction; the MENA Water Review major projects register, where each record cites its source on the project page. The database follows large contracted projects, not the whole asset base.

Gaza’s coastal aquifer supplied drinkable tap water until the 1990s. It now supplies 95% of Gaza’s water, and 97% of what is pumped fails WHO standards.¹⁵¹⁰ Abstraction reached 192.5 MCM in 2021, against a sustainable yield of 50–60 MCM, and the water table had fallen to 19 m below sea level.¹⁰ Seawater has moved in behind it. Chloride and nitrate in most areas exceed WHO levels by up to eight times, and nearly 70% of privately produced desalinated water showed some contamination.¹⁶ In 2017 the UN country team projected that no aquifer water would be safe to drink by 2020, and that the damage would be irreversible.¹⁷

Gaza since October 2023

On 9 October 2023 Israel cut the water piped into Gaza, which had supplied about 12% of its total water and more than half of its drinking water.¹⁸ Water production from October 2023 to mid-February 2024 fell to 5.7% of pre-war levels, on OCHA figures.¹⁸ Disease followed. Between mid-October 2023 and mid-February 2024 the WHO recorded 222,620 cases of acute watery diarrhoea, more than half of them among children under five.¹⁹ Poliovirus was isolated from six sewage samples collected in June 2024.²⁰ In December 2024 Human Rights Watch concluded that cutting and restricting water, electricity and fuel amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.¹⁸ Israel disputed the findings, saying its pipelines and desalination supplies were operating.²¹

The ceasefire of October 2025 did not end the crisis. Half of Gaza’s families then had less than six litres per person a day for drinking and cooking, UNICEF found.²² In May 2026 UNICEF counted 82% of families as water-insecure.²³ By August 2026, 70% of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure was damaged, and 63% of people could not obtain six litres of drinking water a day.²⁴

The West Bank

A military order of November 1967 made any new Palestinian water installation subject to an army permit.²⁵ Oslo II committed both sides to treat or properly dispose of all sewage. The joint committee approved 58% of Palestinian wastewater projects, against 96% of Israeli ones.²⁶²⁷ Since the start of 2026 settlers have attacked the Ein Samia pumping station, which serves about 100,000 Palestinians in more than 20 communities, at least 10 times. One attack in February cut water for 12 hours.¹¹

The reported indicators

Sources: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme via the World Bank; SDG 6.3.1 and 6.3.2 from the UN Statistics Division SDG database, retrieved September 2026. Safely managed means an improved source on the premises, available when needed and free from priority contamination. SDG 6.3.2 rests on each country’s own monitoring network, so a high share can mean few water bodies were assessed, and values move when methods change between reporting rounds.

The Oslo framework

The Israeli–Palestinian Interim Agreement, Oslo II, was signed in Washington on 28 September 1995.²⁸ Its Article 40 recognised Palestinian water rights in the West Bank, to be settled in permanent-status negotiations. It put future Palestinian needs at 70–80 MCM a year and set out 28.6 MCM of additional supply for the interim period.²⁶ A Joint Water Committee with equal representation would decide by consensus. Every new well and every increase in extraction, by either side, required its prior approval.²⁶

Schedule 10 put the mountain aquifer’s annual recharge at 679 MCM. The existing uses it lists add up to 483 MCM for Israel and 118 MCM for Palestinians, with a further 78 MCM in the Eastern Aquifer left to be developed. In the Western Aquifer, the largest, 340 MCM was used within Israel and 22 MCM went to Palestinians.²⁶

The committee’s record is contested. From 1995 to 2008 Palestinians submitted 602 applications and Israelis 135, a study of the committee files by Jan Selby found. Israeli wells and supply networks were all approved, against 30–66% of Palestinian wells. Every Palestinian application for a production well in the Western Aquifer was rejected.²⁷ In Area C, 60% of the West Bank, Palestinian projects also needed approval from Israel’s Civil Administration.²⁷ Israel’s Water Authority, for its part, says it supplied 60 MCM in 2014, well above its obligations.²⁹

The committee did not meet for six years before January 2017, when the two sides agreed to restart it.³⁰ In July 2017 the United States announced an Israeli sale of 32 MCM of water to the Palestinian Authority. The deal was framed as part of the Red Sea–Dead Sea scheme that Jordan later abandoned.³¹ Palestine had acceded to the UN Watercourses Convention in 2015.³² Palestinian official statistics put Israeli control at more than 85% of Palestinian water.¹⁰

Springs and reservoirs on the ground

In a 2011 survey OCHA identified 56 springs near Israeli settlements. At 30 of them Palestinian access was restricted: at 22 through intimidation and violence, and at eight through fences under full settler control.¹⁴ In July 2026 Israeli soldiers raided Solomon’s Pools near Bethlehem. Two months earlier Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had threatened to erase the agreements confirming Palestinian ownership of the site.³³

The record

Shared river basins

Cooperation and conflict on the record, 1948 to 2008

The International Water Events Database scores every reported interaction between riparian states on the Basins at Risk scale, from formal war over water to voluntary unification. Cooperative and conflictive events add up to less than 100% because neutral events are counted too.

Source: Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, International Water Events Database, Oregon State University, as compiled by the Transboundary Waters Atlas. The series ends in 2008; every later dispute and agreement is outside it and is covered in the text above.

The agreements

Source: Master Treaties Database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (February 2023 edition), via the Transboundary Waters Atlas. Titles as recorded, with spelling normalised. Colonial-era boundary instruments appear because they fixed water rights on rivers that later became international.

Joint bodies

• Joint Water Committee between Israel and Palestine (JWC4)Jordan · 1995 · Israel, Palestine Territories

Source: the river basin organisation database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (2013). A joint body on paper is not evidence that it meets.

Shared aquifers

• Coastal Aquifer BasinEgypt, Israel, State of Palestine · data good
• Eastern Mountain AquiferIsrael, State of Palestine · data good
• Northeastern Mountain AquiferIsrael, State of Palestine · data good
• Western Mountain AquiferIsrael, State of Palestine · data good

Source: IGRAC and UNESCO, Transboundary Aquifers of the World. Data reliability is IGRAC’s own assessment of the information behind each outline.

Palestinian water development is still bound by Article 40 of the 1995 Interim Agreement.¹ It set up a Joint Water Committee to manage West Bank water and develop new supplies.² The 2014 Water Law created the Water Sector Regulatory Council, an independent body that reports to the Cabinet. It approves tariffs, licenses service providers and protects consumers.¹ The law also provides for a National Water Company as bulk supplier, but in 2020 it had yet to be established.¹⁵ Most service providers still ran under the 1997 local government law.¹ In Gaza, the World Bank helped build the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility as provider for all 25 municipalities, in 1995–99 and 2005–08.⁵ Weak capacity and political realities have limited the law’s implementation.⁴

Money

About US$1.3 billion was invested in water and sanitation between 2008 and 2018.⁵ Cost recovery is weak. In Gaza, tariffs covered two-thirds of costs, but providers collected only 37 cents per dollar billed.¹ In the West Bank, providers collected 68% of bills, and tariffs ranged from NIS 1.63 to NIS 8.13 per m³.¹ Arrears to the bulk supplier reached about US$335 million in 2017.¹ In 2016 Israel’s finance minister deducted US$94 million from revenues due to the Palestinian Authority for unpaid Mekorot water bills.¹

Palestinian water outcomes are decided in negotiations as much as in aquifers. Gaza’s water system needs US$4.24 billion of recovery work, and its aquifer was failing before the war.⁶ The climate adds pressure, with up to 30% less rain by 2090 if emissions go unchecked.³

The technical path is clear and costed: desalination for Gaza, rebuilt networks and treatment plants, and a fairer share of the shared aquifers. It waits, as everything here waits, on politics and security.