Daily Life

Vandals Foul Palestinian village’s Water Supply

By Israeli journalist Amira Hass
Haaretz
February 2, 2005

The Madama village’s spring was deliberately contaminated and its water supply system was sabotaged 10 days ago, village council head Ayed Kamal said Sunday.

This is the sixth time in the past three years that the spring, the only source of water of the village’s 1,700 residents, and the water system, has been deliberately damaged.

The village is located near the extremist Yitzhar settlement and its outposts.

An Oxfam delegation, accompanied by an Israel Defense Forces unit for protection, set out last Thursday to gauge the damage. The Oxfam group needed protection after armed Israelis opened fire on workers repairing the spring and water pipes on two previous occasions during 2002.

Talia Somech, a spokeswoman for the IDF’s civil administration, told Haaretz that the IDF learned of the damage only during the visit on Thursday and that the matter would be passed on to the police.

Kamal told Haaretz that 10 days ago a group of Israelis, some of them armed, clashed with shepherds near the spring. That evening the water stopped flowing to the villagers’ houses. On Thursday they found that the water pipes had been broken and the cement encasing one of the water wells had been smashed to pieces. The debris had been thrown into the well.

A number of times from the end of 2000 to the end of 2003, the villagers had no water to their homes after unknown perpetrators smashed the water pipes and threw building waste into the water holes.

Oxfam volunteered to finance the pipes’ repair, but they were vandalized again. Oxfam then encased the pipes above the surface with concrete and built an iron cage around the water holes to protect them. However, once again the concrete and pipes were smashed and the drinking water fouled with dirty diapers and other waste.

In November 2003, Italian volunteers helped the villagers seal the water hole openings with concrete. But in a few months the villagers started suffering from liver infections and stomach diseases. The contaminated water was banned for use until January this year, when after heavy rainfalls the pollution was reduced. The villagers started using it again, until 10 days ago.

Kamal said the Palestinian Authority stopped passing complaints onto the IDF, because it fails to act on Palestinians’ complaints against settlers.

An Oxfam source said the group would prefer investing the funds in new projects, rather than in repairing repeated sabotage carried out by Israeli citizens.