Water Wisdom: Preparing the Groundwork for Cooperative and Sustainable Water Management in the Middle East

Sewage Treatment in Gaza and the Quest to Upgrade Infrastructure

Ministry of Health, State of Israel. 2000. Israeli sanitary quality of drinking water, 1974. Consolidated version (English translation of the Hebrew original). Jerusalem: Ministry of Health. Shelef, G., R. Halperin, and N. Icekson-Tal. 2007. Fifty years of wastewater reuse in Israel. In Wastewater reclamation and reuse for sustainability, ed. I. S. Kim, J. Cho, and S. Kim. Selected papers from the 5th International Conference on Wastewater Reclamation and Reuse for Sustainability (WRRS2005), held in Jeju Island, Korea, November 8–11, 2005. IWA Publishers. Tulchinsky, T. H., et al. 1993. Water quality, water borne disease and enteric disease in Israel, 1976–92. Israel Journal of Medical Sciences 29(12):783–790. U.S. EPA. 2004. 2004 edition of the drinking-water standards and health advisories, EPA 822-R04 –005. http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/drinking/standards/dwstandards.pdf (accessed November 8, 2009). World Health Organization (WHO). (2004). Guidelines for drinking-water quality. 3rd ed. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/gdwq3/en/ (accessed November 8, 2009). Israeli Drinking-Water Resources 169 170 O Editors’ Summary There is a significant gap in the quality of drinking water available to Palestinian and Israeli households. While Israel’s drinking-water quality has largely improved, there are many examples of chronic contamination in Palestinian West Bank communities . Drinking much of the water supplied in the Gaza Strip has for some time been defined as unhealthy. For the foreseeable future, Palestinian and Israeli drinking-water systems will remain intertwined. Today some 40.3mcm of drinking water is supplied by Israel’s Mekorot water utility to houses in the West Bank—well over 60% of present municipal use. An additional 3.2mcm of water is still delivered by Mekorot to the Gaza Strip. This is among the highest-quality water presently available. To change the associated infrastructure and piping that supply this water will take many years and may not make hydrological or economic sense. This means that drinking-water standards between the two parties must at least be harmonized and in the long run should probably be identical. While economic differences exist, the reality is that if Palestinian municipalities provide drinking water that is of poor quality, the population will simply choose to purchase bottled water. This constitutes a disproportionate economic burden on the poorest populations. Bottled water currently sells at rates of 36¢/l in the West Bank. While this is orders of magnitude higher than tap water, large segments of the population are paying for it. Adopting tougher drinking-water standards through harmonization in and of itself will not be enough to improve the Palestinian situation. There are fundamental infrastructure measures which will be required for the present contamination to be reduced. For example, septic tanks will need to be cemented so that wastewater does not escape and percolate directly into the ground and reach drinking-water sources. Cisterns, which in many Palestinian villages are so critical for capturing rainwater, are subject to considerable biologically contamination from bacterial outbreak, bird excrement, and waterborne diseases. Because taps have filters, the population is frequently unaware of the actual water quality and illness is common. Education along with drinking-water protection measures and disinfection kits are needed. Establishing and upgrading sewage treatment is, of course, a critical effort in virtually every Palestinian community. Here, it may make more sense to have differential standards, dependent on the ultimate use of the effluent and its potential to contaminate water resources. In either case, efforts to upgrade Palestinian water infrastructure will be extremely costly for a society whose resources are quite limited. Accordingly, a steady process of ratcheting down drinking-water contaminant levels is envisioned by Palestinian experts. They compare their situation to Israel’s experience. Initial Israeli drinking-water standards were low and gradually became more demanding as the country’s economic conditions improved. For instance, Israel understood that a standard of 90mg/l was desirable for nitrates but couldn’t afford it. Today it can make this commitment. The same is true of the BOD standard for sewage treatment. Today plants are expected to drop to 10mg/l, whereas initial standards could only require that sewage sit for 5 days in an oxidation pond. Palestinians also envision a steady phase-in of higher-quality drinking-water standards. It can be argued that the present contamination is so severe with pollutants that cause acute health effects (e.g., bacterial pollutants) that the correct...