There he was, running from his home in northern Gaza, one of his granddaughters in his arms, as bombs dropped. There he was again, now in the driver’s seat, shielding his face as a car in front of him exploded.
Marwan Bardawil, 61, a Palestinian engineer who has devoted his life to the management of water, recounted these and other episodes over months of conversations via phone and sometimes WhatsApp. It was with a sense of relief and almost disbelief that I finally laid eyes on him in person this past fall: lean and wiry in a gray suit, standing on the doorstep of a terraced Cairo apartment, backlit by the waning afternoon sun.
As an administrator—until recently, the head of the Gaza Program Coordination Unit of the Palestinian Water Authority—Bardawil has for 30 years had one main focus: the water system of the Gaza Strip. In cities around the world, an intricate lattice of pipes connects homes, businesses, and public facilities to sophisticated systems that deliver clean water and take away dirty water. Turn on a tap, and water flows. Flush a toilet, and water disappears. All of this is at once an engineering feat and a mundane luxury. But it was always precarious for the 2.2 million people crowded into Gaza’s 140 square miles. Now, after 15 months of war between Hamas and Israel, the water system in Gaza has gone from hardscrabble and tenuous to virtually nonexistent. The announcement last month of a cease-fire dangles the prospect of hope, though cease-fires are fragile. President Donald Trump’s proposal this week for a U.S. takeover of Gaza, the relocation of everyone living there, and the building of a “Riviera of the Middle East,” adds a bizarre and dangerous new variable.
Engineers in Gaza have no time for bluster and fantasy about the place they know as home. They must deal every day with the damage already done, knowing that it cannot easily be undone. For Gaza’s civilians, the half-life of war is long.
In Cairo, Bardawil gestured with a cigarette. “I don’t think that people … they are not interested in my personal difficulties and problems,” he said. “This will not make a value for anyone.” I had heard this sentiment from him before. No one wants another sad story from Gaza, he would say. He didn’t want to talk about politics. He wanted to stick to the “professional side”—that is, how Gazans get their water.
Bardawil is Gazan by birth and before the war had been living in a town named Rimal. It lies seven miles northwest of Kibbutz Be’eri, the Israeli community across the border where some 100 civilians were killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; all told, the Hamas attacks that day took the lives of almost 1,200. On October 12, amid Israeli air strikes, Bardawil and his adult children and two young grandchildren fled their home. He said they’d made the decision to flee in an instant. “When you left, you left under the threat of losing your life, so you just jump out with what you wear.” The short journey from northern Gaza to a house in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, took days: It was safer to proceed on foot—cars are targets—and intense fighting often forced the family to shelter in place overnight along the way. Despite cellphone service that was frequently jammed, Bardawil remained in contact with his own staff and that of an independent partner, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility. All of them were contending with the worst engineering crisis of their lives.
Bardawil’s managerial career began soon after the signing, in 1993, of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The agreement created the Palestinian Authority; under it, the Palestinian Water Authority was established to oversee water resources.
Bardawil had a degree in mechanical engineering and hydraulics, and had been teaching and working in Libya. The Oslo Accords drew him back to Gaza. He was an idealist who believed in the peace process, but he was also a technocrat who understood how to make pragmatic improvements. Bardawil and the water authority’s dozen other engineers in Gaza worked out of a hotel room at first. They made long-term and short-term plans, hopeful that “what we are doing on paper,” as he put it, would someday become real. In time, the water authority matured into a functional agency.
And it made progress, despite severe obstacles. Gaza was poor and crowded, and its politics were unstable. Violence was part of the environment, and it came both from inside and outside. The PWA never enjoyed real autonomy. The Oslo Accords formalized the significant control over water that Israel had exercised since occupying the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War, in 1967. The water authority had to operate according to Israeli regulations. Permits for new facilities needed Israeli approval. The relationship with Israel was never one of equals—Bardawil referred once to an omnipresent “umbrella of superiority”—but engineer to engineer, it more or less worked. Importantly, the Palestinians were able to leverage international help—from the European Union, Canada, the United Nations, Oxfam—in building new facilities.
The system they patched together had three components. The first depended on water purchased from Israel, which gets some of its own supply from the Coastal Aquifer Basin running beneath Gaza and extending far beyond. The water arrived through three separate connection points and accounted for about 10 percent of Gaza’s total supply. The second part of the system consisted of three large desalination plants positioned along the Mediterranean. Together, these solar-diesel hybrids—built with help from the EU and UNICEF—provided perhaps 7 percent of Gaza’s water. The rest of the water supply—more than 80 percent—came from groundwater accessed by hundreds of wells, some of them with pumping stations. Because of pollution, depletion, and seepage of water from the sea, the groundwater was of poor quality—brackish and salty, with a high level of chemicals. But it was accessible.
From these sources, the population of Gaza in normal times was able to utilize about 80 liters of water—roughly 21 gallons—per person a day, a third of the amount typically available to Israelis and about a quarter of the water available to the average American. Eighty liters is barely above what the World Health Organization considers to be a safe level. The people of Gaza made do.
Through it all—elections, intifadas, attacks—Gaza’s engineers kept the system running. For the most part, they did not involve themselves in politics. In 2006, Hamas wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, the secular party of the Palestinian Authority. (Fatah remains in power in the West Bank.) The engineers and civil servants stuck close to their expertise and tried to focus on maintaining a basic level of service, inadequate though it was.
Everything changed when Hamas breached Gaza’s fortified border with Israel on October 7. In addition to the large number killed, some 250 people were taken hostage. Israel responded with a military campaign—a sustained aerial bombardment and then a ground invasion. Gaza was placed under siege. On October 9, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.”
Israel’s onslaught has taken the lives of tens of thousands of civilians—the exact number is hard to know and politically charged. The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza has put the total number of civilian and militant deaths through January at about 47,000. It is a count that the United Nations has relied on and that the Israeli government has criticized as exaggerated. There has also been at least one independent attempt to capture the number of people killed. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet estimated the total number through last summer at a minimum of 55,000. Lethal force aside, Israel’s capabilities are significant. It can cut off or reduce the availability of outside water and electricity for Gaza. It can restrict fuel supplies and disrupt communications. Access to clean water has been among the gravest challenges. At the worst moments during the war, the average person in Gaza was getting a little less than a gallon of water a day.
The PWA engineers watched as the water system they’d created was torn apart. I began speaking with Bardawil, alongside my colleague Hanna Rosin, and those conversations became the basis for a podcast episode of Radio Atlantic. He described to me the wrenching experience of having to ration water for his own granddaughters. When we met in Cairo, he tried to sum up his feelings: “To see plans jump from paper to become realistic projects, and then to witness the destruction of these facilities, and how the people are impacted, is …” But he never finished the thought, shifting back to his “professional side.”
Also on October 9, the Israeli water company Mekorot shut off the supply flowing to Gaza through the three major junctions. Bardawil remembered the numbers falling: “One of the pipes goes down from 700 cubic meters per hour to zero. Other line—800 cubic meters per hour—goes to zero. The third one—1,400 cubic meters per hour—goes to zero.” It would take more than a week, and international pressure, before water from any of these connection points was restored, but never again would it flow at the original capacity.
Meanwhile, the vascular network of smaller pipes that bring water to homes and businesses, schools and hospitals—a network built over three decades—collapsed under Israeli bombardment. A grim pattern was established: Pipes would be destroyed, repaired, and then destroyed again. Communication between Gaza engineers and their Israeli counterparts went from perfunctory to disjointed. At times, the Israelis would unexpectedly open the taps, only for the water to reach the damaged tributary pipes and then gush wastefully into the sand or the streets.
Gaza’s three large desalination plants started to fail; the Israelis had halted deliveries of diesel fuel and solar components, fearing that Hamas would redirect both to military use. Gaza’s six sewage-treatment plants, which operate on diesel as well, also began to fail.
In theory, the more than 80 percent of the water supply that comes from groundwater, by means of local wells, was less subject to disruption. But as the Israeli invasion continued and entire regions were leveled, roughly half of Gaza’s population was pushed from north to south; many people crowded into tent cities. The forced migration put groundwater sources in the north beyond reach while doubling the burden on resources in the south.
Those resources are vulnerable. In July, Israeli forces destroyed or damaged wells and other water-related sites across southern Gaza. An Israeli soldier posted a video on social media of the Israel Defense Forces fixing explosives to pipes at one of the wells, as well as footage of the well exploding. A caption read “in honor of Shabbat.”
The groundwater was by now heavily contaminated—a catastrophic consequence of the sewage plants’ failure, poor sanitation in the tent cities, and the onset of heavy rains. By summer, some 70 percent of what had been Gaza’s sewage system either didn’t work or no longer existed. So much sewage flowed uncollected that none of the systems could not keep up with the level of groundwater contamination.
As of August, Gaza had nearly 600,000 documented cases of acute diarrhea, a condition attributable to contaminated water. It had 40,000 cases of hepatitis A. And that month, a 10-month-old baby—paralyzed—tested positive for polio, the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter century.
Leaving Gaza had not been Bardawil’s intention, but his superior at the Palestinian Water Authority encouraged him to get out. He himself also realized it was time to go: Using Gaza as a base of operations was becoming too difficult and too dangerous. In April, Bardawil had been driving home from a water facility that needed repairs when the car in front of him blew up. Bardawil was wounded when shrapnel from the blast smashed his windshield. Weeks later, he left with his family, using an Egyptian company that specializes in facilitating the passage of Gazans into Egypt. (The price is $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child.) They joined the more than 100,000 other Gazans who have fled to Egypt. Bardawil’s job now is to coordinate with donor countries and international organizations. From Cairo, Bardawil looked back with resignation on the legacy of the past three decades: “All that we planned, all that we implemented, all that has been invested in—it’s totally gone.” It was as if his life, he said, had been “for nothing.”
But that wasn’t true. During nearly a year and a half of war, Bardawil and the other engineers had worked to salvage what they could. Part of the task involved reconfiguring pipelines and water mains—the conduits from Israel, from the desalination plants, from smaller facilities—so that water would follow the population as it moved south. Another part involved fixing the damage to pipes and wells caused by bombs and artillery. All of this was never-ending, often futile. Every day, every hour, was consumed by desperate acts of coordination and repair. Cellphones were unreliable. Attacks proved lethal. In June, an Israeli air strike on a building in Gaza City killed five municipal workers as they operated local wells. In October, four water engineers were killed when their car was bombed while they were on their way to make repairs near Khan Younis. According to Oxfam, their vehicle was marked and their movements had been coordinated with the Israeli government.
Life in Gaza has been sustained by intermittent convoys of water tankers and trucks with cargoes of plastic bottles. Images of children standing in line with yellow water jugs half their size have become a staple in news reports and on social media. Plenty of water is available outside Gaza. Moving it into Gaza has required continual, vexing diplomacy by the water authority. The process for other commodities has been even more complicated. Bardawil recalled the PWA spending 10 days trying to persuade Israel to release enough diesel to power the generators that pump the wells in Gaza City.
My visit with Bardawil this past fall coincided with Cairo Water Week, a yearly conference where economists, engineers, and diplomats gather to discuss policy and innovations in water management. In 2022, Bardawil had attended the conference and talked about a pilot program he’d been proud of—how the PWA had helped connect a small wastewater-treatment plant and an agricultural project run by women. A year into the war, the plant and the project were gone. What is essential now, he explained during this year’s conference, is getting big, solar-powered water-treatment units into Gaza. He was hoping for 25 of them—each the size of a shipping container. This number, he believed, would be enough to ensure some measure of stability—collectively providing as many as 1 million Gazans with as much as two and a half gallons of water a day. That’s not a permanent solution, or even close, but units such as these are common in many parts of the world. They are relatively inexpensive, and they work.
Under the terms of the cease-fire announced in January, Hamas would begin releasing hostages, and Israel would expand the size of relief convoys permitted to enter Gaza. Since the cease-fire took hold, the amount of water available to each person in Gaza has been about seven to 10 liters a day—about two and a half gallons at most. Israel had already started providing electricity to one of the desalination plants. But most of Gaza’s water infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. The Palestinian Water Authority has put together a six-month plan with the overarching goals for Gaza that one would expect: restore the water connection from Israel; get the desalination plants working; do something about sewage. The full list of what needs to be done is impossibly long. And many of the very people planning the reconstruction of the water system are themselves struggling to reconstruct their own lives.
Bardawil told me that he looked forward to a time when war would end, and killing would end, and people in Gaza could rebuild their lives and their hope in one another. “I’m not sure that I will witness that day,” he admitted. But seeing the arrival of 25 desalination containers would be a start.
The post Gazans Don’t Need a Riviera. They Need Water. appeared first on The Atlantic.
