Thirst and water shortage affecting 90 of Gaza

After two full months of water being cut off from her nearly destroyed home in the Al-Nasr neighborhood, west of Gaza City, Khadija Nabhan, in her thirties, turned on the kitchen tap, hoping to hear a sound that would quench her long-awaited thirst. She waited for the sound of flowing water, but the silence spoke volumes, and the dilapidated house remained captive to a heavy thirst that burdened every aspect of life.

In her home, piles of dishes and dirty laundry lay accumulating, waiting for water that hadn’t visited the house for weeks: “The water crisis is very difficult. A few days ago, I heard that a thin trickle of water had reached a line near my home, so I rushed there, and there I had a difficult and agonizing experience.”

Two hours of waiting yielded only two buckets of water, barely enough for her most basic needs. The woman whose husband was killed during the genocide has no one to help her in the arduous struggle to find a lifeline and cope with the burden of transportation. Her children are young. “My back is practically screaming with pain… I’m certain I’ve developed a slipped disc from carrying water and firewood over the past two years,” she adds bitterly.

For Nabhan, drinking water remains another burden. She buys it when she can afford it, or she waits for a truck distributing it for free, around which young and old crowd, barely managing to get a gallon or two.

Hundreds of meters south of the city, Muhammad Ubaid walks about a kilometer round trip from his tent of forced displacement, under the midday sun, to obtain some water whose salinity is almost like that of the sea.

He tells us, “I waited two weeks before I learned that a meager amount