Amid an intensifying Israeli military offensive and a deadly famine that is deepening daily, Gazans are facing a third crisis: a lack of drinking water.
In what the United Nations has described as a “man-made drought,” Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip are left chasing down water trucks, washing in seawater, and trekking miles to find enough drops of water to last the day.
It is, they say, an all-consuming crisis.
Why We Wrote This
Among all the shortages in war-ravaged Gaza, clean water is one of the most critical. Already facing the perils of famine and a new Israeli military offensive, families must engage in a daily hunt for water that often is barely usable.
“This war is not only airstrikes,” Suzan Abu Khaddoura, a displaced mother of four, says as she treks from her sea-side tent to a water vendor. “It is about food. It is about hygiene. It is about water.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli military deepened its operations in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun – and the number of Palestinians who have died of starvation rose to 303, according to Gaza health authorities, days after U.N. experts declared famine in the strip. But water remained elusive for nearly all Gazans.
Few water sources
Prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s military offensive, Gazans relied on a combination of desalination plants funded and supported by international aid agencies and water pumped from Israel.
Aquifers under Gaza that once provided drinking water have been contaminated by seeping seawater from the Mediterranean, sewage, and chemicals from multiple wars, aid agencies say. Israel has repeatedly turned off the taps to Gaza during its siege of the strip.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency responsible for coordinating aid in the occupied Palestinian territories, says it continues to operate two water pipelines into the Gaza Strip, but local Gaza water authorities say they have rarely functioned.
The Israeli military has damaged 60% of Gaza’s 196 desalination plants, which are run by nongovernmental organizations and public authorities, leaving 40% operational, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the U.N.
Yet these plants are fuel-reliant, and Israeli restrictions on fuel have pushed many offline.
From June 2024 until August 2025, Israel has denied 90% of MSF’s requests to import items and parts for desalination plants, the organization says, accusing Israel of “deliberately depriving people of water in Gaza.”
The plants that are still operational fill up water trucks, which, limited by fuel shortages and active combat zones, attempt to make rounds in the strip.
Another day without water
These water trucks are lifelines to tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians, like Ms. Abu Khaddoura.
On a late August day, Ms. Abu Khaddoura is roused in the early morning, like many mornings, by the distant rumble of a water truck.
She calls all of her four children, between the ages of 6 and 15, to run after the truck and flag it down.
But once she steps outside her recently built tent on the Deir al-Balah beach, she is hit with disappointment. The truck is gone. Now the family will spend another day without water.
Her family has been displaced several times across the strip, most recently displaced by Israel’s current offensive focusing on Gaza City and Deir al-Balah.
Following a lesson they learned on their journey of displacement, the family placed their tents on the coast.
“The water can be cut, but God’s water [the sea] does not cut out,” Ms. Abu Khaddoura says of their gravitation to the sea.
“When we get displaced from one place to another, we make water a priority,” explains Reem Abu Khaddoura, a teenage cousin of Suzan living in a nearby tent.
Yet the shortage is relentless.
Seawater for everything
With water scarce, Suzan Abu Khaddoura has adapted to using the salty seawater for almost everything – laundry, washing dishes, and even showers for herself and her children. But they still must use precious fresh water.
“We need clean water to wash the clothes after washing them with the sea,” she explains.
And so, with no water truck on this day, she walks.
Ms. Abu Khaddoura treks two miles to northeast Deir al-Balah to fill her jerry cans from a water vendor selling desalinated water collected from a plant. Ten liters cost $1.35 – a high price for a family living in extreme poverty.
She walks home to children who are often ill.
Her young teenage son, Ahmed, wakes up several times each night with diarrhea. All her children have skin conditions from their inability to bathe. Stomachaches are common.
“The problem is I don’t know what to do. They need a clean environment,” she says. “They want water. How can I find it?”
Even their tent’s bathroom – the one modern convenience they still have – cannot be used freely. Flushing consumes too much water, so they delay it, often resorting to pouring in a bucket of seawater.
An exhausting ritual
Meanwhile, Reem Abu Khaddoura and her sister Aseel begin and end each day with the same exhausting ritual: hauling water.
They walk a half-mile to a desalination plant run by the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, a utility company funded and backed by international aid agencies, one of the few nearby desalination plants still online, to fill up two large jerry cans.
Reem trudges back to her tent, her muscles sore and strained, her hands left red and raw. And the water? Barely usable.
“The water is salty and insufficient. I can barely fill two cans, and then I have to use them for the rest of the day,” says Reem, who has stomachaches and other painful symptoms from drinking unclean water.
Only a few hours pass before the two sisters make the same return journey in the late afternoon.
Bottled water, a dream for the family, is rarely available on the market, and when it is, it is prohibitively expensive.
“We cannot even find money for food, let alone water,” Aseel Abu Khaddoura says.
