On Irrigation

The water situation in Gaza has been grave for a long time. After 1948, with the arrival of the refugees, the already limited natural resources of the Strip, which relies on a network of shallow aquifers, began to be overstretched.

In the 1980s, when the Israelis were in control of both the civil and military administration of the Strip, they built their settlement right on top of the best water sources and overdrew from the coastal aquifer for intensive greenhouse horticulture projects. Then, when the Palestinian Authority took over after the Oslo Accords in 1994, they had neither the force nor the mandate to control drilling and pumping. When the Israeli borders closed at the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000, hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed people returned to subsistence farming in Gaza, leading to a major crisis of over-drilling for irrigation.