Daily Alert Archives

Claims that Israel Deprives Palestinians of Water Are Groundless

[Ha'aretz] Israel Harel - Any libel involving discrimination against Palestinians immediately makes headlines. Yet Amnesty's accusations that Israeli settlers are taking Palestinians' water are groundless. Most of the settlements get their water piped in from inside the Green Line, not, as Amnesty claims, from wells that belong to the Palestinians. According to the Oslo II accords, the Palestinians are entitled to 23.6 million cubic meters a year - but in fact they pump, with Israeli consent, 70 million cubic meters. On top of this, the Israeli Civil Administration supplies, over and above the Oslo requirements, water to villages that are suffering from a shortage. Amnesty does not ask where the millions of dollars that flowed to the Palestinian Authority for the construction of an efficient water system have vanished, or where the money is that the World Bank provided for a sewage system that would protect the environment and prevent the seepage of wastewater into the aquifers.
2009-10-22 06:00:00
Full Article