Al Jazeera’s report on families forced to rely on unsafe sources due to the damaged water infrastructure in Gaza.
Water, water, water. Everywhere I turn lately, all I can see and hear are people talking about water. There’s not enough. People are parched. People are dehydrated. People are dying because of lack of water.
The word “water” is literally on everyone’s lips, ironically except on the lips of Palestinians.
Why is that, do you think? Is it because Palestinian lives have always been considered exceptions to everyone else’s? Does being Palestinian somehow exempt you from the need for daily water? Are the “resilient” Palestinian people somehow possessed with magical powers and strength that allow them to survive with the bare minimum of access to water?
Well, I hate to burst your bubble. But Palestinians are human — just like me and you. They generally come with two kidneys, two lungs, a liver, a heart, and all the other major organs you and I have.
They come with skin that gets burnt. Skin that gets bitten by insects. Skin that gets dry and gets rashes. Skin that needs water to hydrate and soothe, especially in these soaring temperature months of summer.
Let me take you on a little journey.
How did your day start today? What’s the first thing you did when you woke up?
Did you go to the toilet?
Did you brush your teeth?
Did you wash your face and hands?
Did you take a shower?
Did you fill the kettle and make yourself a cup of tea or coffee?
Maybe you decided to boil an egg or two for breakfast?
Maybe that little pot of herbs on your windowsill in the kitchen needed a bit of watering?
Maybe you decided to do a laundry wash today?
Maybe you were lazy and didn’t wash up the dishes last night, so you put on the dishwasher or washed them in the sink?
Whatever you did, I want you to walk yourself back through every action and see how many involved water.
Every single one of those normal, small actions demands water, and most of us just really take it for granted. But imagine if it was all suddenly taken away.
Your toilet is now backed up with waste that has nowhere to go.
Your mouth is dry and smells foul because you can’t brush your teeth.
You can’t wash your face or hands, and you’ve just used the toilet.
Shower? What shower?
Kettle? What kettle? Even if you had enough water to fill a kettle, you have no way of heating it anyway.
Boil an egg? You haven’t been able to afford eggs for months, so that’s off your list anyway.
The little herb pot you used to have is no longer there because you don’t have a windowsill in your fabric shelter.
Laundry wash? The only other set of clothes you have will just have to air out in the sun. You can’t waste water on washing clothes.
And don’t get me started on the dishes. You didn’t eat last night because there was no food, and therefore there are no dishes to wash anyway. First win of the day...
Imagine that for a single moment. Imagine how you would cope. Then imagine that this wasn’t just affecting your house. This was your whole neighbourhood. This was your whole region. This was your whole country, and there were ghouls standing on your border refusing to allow water to come in. Those same ghouls that caused this water scarcity in the first place. Those same ghouls bombed the majority of your water wells. Those same ghouls bombed your desalination plants. Those same ghouls bombed your pipe infrastructure, and they bombed your house as well, so the infrastructure became useless anyway.
Imagine those same ghouls are the only ones controlling water into your country. Those same ghouls that are murdering your people every day. Much of the water that is available in Gaza is contaminated anyway and can’t be used, so that reduces the amount of available clean water even further.
Then imagine that your only hope was appealing to strangers on the internet to help. Imagine having to put your little kids in front of cameras for the world to see, begging and pleading for water. And then those same kids thanking the faceless people in the camera for sending them a cup of water to drink that day.
The sheer indignity of this makes me so angry.
But that’s where we are.
Gaza's Forgotten Families Water Distribution 8/8/26
Water is life. None of us can live without water. We need it to hydrate our bodies, but it’s so much more than that. Having just enough water to stop us from dying is the bare minimum of survival.
Living is a whole other thing.
For Palestinians, the search for water every day is a desperate hunt that starts at dawn for many and probably never stops throughout the day.
Many families send their children out with containers to search for water, and they can spend their whole day searching and fetching heavy containers back to their tent — that’s if they’re lucky.
And then they have to do it all again the next day.
Have you ever lifted a 5‑litre bottle of water? Try it. Sure, you can probably lift it, but actually carrying it for a long distance? I know I can just about lift one into the boot of my car and into the house, but I couldn’t lug it back from the shops if I had to walk.
The reason Gaza’s Forgotten Families diverted its aid programme into emergency water initiatives is obvious. Without water you can die in a couple of days. Without easy access, you get children getting stomach hernias from carrying heavy containers they were never built to carry. Without easy access, mothers and fathers spend their days walking in the scorching heat in search of enough water just to drink and stop them dying.
This is the first week since we started GFF that we don’t have enough money to carry out the week’s water initiative ahead. We don’t have enough to carry out 50% of the initiative, and yet we must transfer over what we have tomorrow so that at least that much can be converted into water. We don’t wait because Palestinian families can’t wait.
I am absolutely begging any of you who have some money to spare to please consider donating it to GFF so that we can get water to Palestinian families this week.
I keep watching the videos we post and think, “What if we can’t even get that child a cup of water this week?” and honestly I’m on the verge of having a panic attack at the thought.
I know there are many calls on us to give. I know there are many calls on us to help. But every one of us needs to do something this week. We still need about $2000 to allow us to carry out water deliveries all next week.
Whatever bit of that you can donate will help. Every dollar will turn into water, and somewhere in Gaza someone will drink.
🔗 https://chuffed.org/project/183781-gaza-forgotten-families-fund
