Human Rights Watch says Israeli forces have acted deliberately to cut availability of clean water
Girls walking past a puddle of raw sewage on their way to collect water in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in July.Girls walking past a puddle of raw sewage on their way to collect water in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in July.Israel’s restriction of Gaza’s water supply to levels below minimum needs amounts to an act of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, a human rights report has alleged.
The allegations put forward by HRW are not as broad as Amnesty’s, focusing specifically on the Gaza water supply, but the organisation claims the evidence is overwhelming that Israel has used water as a weapon against the Palestinian population collectively, with lethal results.“Human Rights Watch finds that these Israeli policies have amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide,” Lama Fakih, the director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, said.
There have been nearly 670,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhoea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Survivable childhood diseases have also become significantly more lethal because of the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics.The report cites a medical source as saying that under “normal circumstances”, 1% of children who contracted hepatitis A died of it. Now it is fatal in 5% to 10% of cases.
Satellite imagery that HRW examined showed that the solar panel arrays powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants were razed by Israeli military bulldozers – in northern Gaza, the al-Bureij camp and the Sheikh Ejleen plants in central Gaza and Khan Younis in the south.
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