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Response to Amnesty Report on Israeli-Palestinian Water Issues
[Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs] According to the Oslo agreement, 23.6 million cubic meters of water will be allocated to the Palestinians annually. In actual effect, the Palestinians have access to twice as much water. Israel has extensively surpassed the obligatory quantity of water. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have significantly violated their commitments regarding important issues such as illegal drilling (they have drilled over 250 wells without authorization of the Joint Water Commission) and handling of sewage. (The Palestinians are not constructing sewage treatment plants, despite their obligation to do so and the important foreign funding earmarked for this purpose.) Israel has offered to supply Palestinians with desalinated water, but this has been systematically rejected due to political motivations. Israel has significantly reduced its use of fresh natural water from 508 (m3/person/year) in 1967 to 149 in 2008. During the same period, Palestinian consumption rose from 86 to 105. It remains unclear how Amnesty's claims of "discriminatory policies" towards Palestinians can sustain the trial of reality. The authors of the report chose to ignore Israeli data, although they contain verifiable facts presented with total transparency.