Water Is Not Political

Girls Junior's new Snack Stash was made for Munchie Madness.

Mix and match any three sides, just $5.99.

Get onion rings, waffle fries, and jalapeno popper bites.

Natural cut fries, fried zucchini, and why not another fried zucchini?

Get any three sides in your Snack Stash, just $5.99.

Only at Girls Junior.

My Rewards members get a Snack Stash free

with any new triple burger purchase in the app. Munch responsibly.
Only for My Rewards members for a limited time at participating restaurants. See up for terms.
At T-Mobile, our critical mission is providing unparalleled 5G coverage for when connectivity is mission critical. Introducing T-Priority, America's best 5G network experience for first responders, even in times of congestion.
More capacity, faster speeds,

better coverage. T-Priority from T-Mobile, built for tomorrow's emergencies, ready today.

Discover more at t-priority.com. For qualifying organizations on eligible rate plans, coverage is not available in some areas and may be impacted by emergencies.
With every day that goes by, the ceasefire in Gaza, if we can even still call it that, seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan, American diplomats met with Hamas.
But so far, no agreement and no consensus. For the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.

About a week ago, Israel once again cut off power,

which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza,

and power helps bring them clean water.

And clean water helps keep them alive.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and this is Radio Atlantic. Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bartowheel.
He's a water engineer in Gaza, someone who's regularly calculating inflows, outflows, reviewing plans, engineering new ideas to keep the Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war, whatever's going on politically. And something about this bureaucrat trying day after day to keep the water on really captured the growing desperation of the war.
Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7th and continued to get more impossible by the day. When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza.
Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south. And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Abade, caught up with him to try and learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people.
Claudine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
So, Claudine, there's so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves, the thousands who've had their lives basically upended during the war. I know many have left the country.
What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave? Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old. He's a father and a grandfather.
And he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli airstrikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters, they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza.
And then last summer, like almost 100,000 other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt. you lost everything.
Just you are here. It's like you saved your body from physical death.
Many people fled to Egypt in this little sliver of a window where the border was open and people planned to get out through basically this company, this Egyptian company charging $5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child to get people out.

So, you know, it's not an altruistic endeavor.

Ultimately, there were two reasons that really pushed Marwan to leave.

From the professional side, he was starting to get pressure, counsel, I think is the right word, from his boss, that if he could get out, he should because his work was really valuable to them and they needed him alive. Oof.
The second reason was this moment that he described to me where he was driving his car and the car in front of him exploded. And, you know, shrapnel from the car busted through his windshield, injured his shoulder, and I think it was just too close of a call.

So, you know, when he described that moment to me,

he said three weeks later, he and his family, they were gone.

How did water work in Gaza before the war?

Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn't easy,

even the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing.

It's true. Water was never a sure thing in Gaza.

It's a total patchwork of a system there.

Basically have a combination of water sources.

One is coming from Israel. That's about 10% of their water.

And that comes from three main connection points.

The rest is coming from groundwater that gets treated. So the Palestinian Water Authority says that before the war, there were 306 groundwater wells as primary sources of water.
They also have three desalination plants. They're situated along the coast, And they're basically treating seawater.

The output is not huge. And then they also have a lot of small-scale desalination plants and water tankers that are, you know, just kind of filling in the gap.
So it's not an ideal system. You have a lot of moving parts, and the source water that you're starting with is already not a great starting point.
How much water did make it to Palestinians with that arrangement? The average person in Gaza was getting around 80 liters of water a day, and most Americans, we use about 300 liters of water a day. So that's what was going on before October 7th.
Right. So that was the baseline before the war.
Then comes October 7th. And you've described the intense bombing campaign that destroyed a lot of the North.
How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer? So pipes are getting blown up and teams are rushing out to try to repair, you know, what they can, what damage is happening in various locations, and they don't know what they're walking into. So we do know that there were two separate occasions in which workers who were either doing a water repair or heading to a water repair were killed.
So the conditions were really dangerous. And, you know, I'm sure you and many people have seen the images of the destruction in Gaza.
And when I was in Egypt, Marwan shared some of his photos with me. Oh my God.
It's rubble. Yeah.
This is the Palestinian Water Authority office in Gaza? In Gaza, yes. So the office itself got destroyed.
Yeah, yeah, it's destroyed. By the summer of 2024, almost every connection point, every desalination plant, every sewage station had either been totally destroyed or had sustained some amount of damage.
So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. Like, how did that change their lives? Right.
This kind of massive destruction of water infrastructure, it does not just affect the water supply. It also leads to diseases.
So by the summer of last year, we know that about 600,000 cases of acute diarrhea were reported and 40,000 cases of hepatitis A.

And those are diseases that come from contamination of water and from having an open sewage system.

And then around that same time, humanitarian aid workers become extremely concerned because they find that a 10-month-old baby has tested positive for polio.

And polio is something that can spread through contaminated water.

And this was the first confirmed case in Gaza of polio in a quarter of a century. So they go on a massive campaign to vaccinate kids for polio, and that campaign is still ongoing today.
Now we're a few weeks into the ceasefire. Maybe it's a precarious ceasefire.
It's not really clear. What's the current water situation? For most of the war, people were getting somewhere near three liters of water a day, which is like so little.
And that was for cooking, for hygiene, for drinking. After the ceasefire in January, some people in Gaza were starting to get around seven to 10 liters a day.
So a little bit better. A little bit better.
You know, not a crazy jump, but it was an improvement. And last month when I checked in with the Palestinian Water Authority, at least one connection point with Israel was flowing again.

And one main desalination plant was reconnected to Israel's power grid. And so that was helping.
But this week, as you mentioned, Israel cut off the electricity to that desalination plant. So it's very possible that the water situation could turn dire again very quickly.
I will say that Marwan and his colleagues at the PWA,

they do have a six-month plan that they have started implementing during this ceasefire.

Whether they can continue to implement that plan is really up in the air at this moment.

Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note,

because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves,

as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right? Right.
Trump's vision is a Middle Eastern Riviera, as he called it. And in that plan, he talks about displacing all of the Palestinians that live in Gaza and having them get absorbed by Arab countries and then the U.S.
taking ownership of Gaza. So, you know, presumably then whoever Trump wants to contract with will come in and rebuild Gaza.
However, last week, Arab countries came together in Egypt, and they agreed on a plan that could potentially include the Water Authority. They say their plan will cost $53 billion.
It would be one that calls for rebuilding Gaza in a way that doesn't displace Gazans. And it calls for a Palestinian government to manage the rebuilding.
So that vision, very different from Trump's vision. That vision is a vision of Gazans rebuilding Gaza.
Okay, so there's all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this? You know, Marwan has been building and rebuilding the water infrastructure for decades.
You know, one of the reasons that I was interested in following him was that his personal life and his career really kind of let you see the track of what happened in Gaza since 1993. On behalf of the United States and Russia, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process, welcome to this great occasion of history and hope.
The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization,

and this was a really important moment. We know a difficult road lies ahead.
Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation. But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends, And the Quran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.
At that time, there was hope. There was hope that this would be an area that would be able to govern itself.
It would be able to build for itself. It would be able to think about its infrastructure for itself.
And, you know, Marwan's life and his career sort of maps out what happened. After the break, Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn't working with all that much.
What does it look like to push through this time around with even less. Any vehicle can take you places, but why stop there? The Alfa Romeo Tenale combines luxurious Italian design and electrifying performance to make every mile a masterpiece and every arrival unforgettable.
When precision meets instinct and power moves with purpose, you never have to stay in a lane. Experience a world without limits in the Alfa Romeo Tenale plug-in hybrid.
Tap the banner to learn more. Alfa Romeo is a registered trademark of FCA Group Marketing SPA.
Use with permission. Welcome to Sephora.
I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.

Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

Let's get into layering.

My concealer is making me look worse.

Sounds like the wrong shade.

Let's get you matched.

There's only one store that really gets what you're going for.

Get beauty from people who get beauty.

Only at Sephora.

Hi, I... Let's get you a basket.
Claudine, Marwan's been working on water in Gaza for like 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy.
me. But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords in the 90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different.
Did you talk to Marwan about this? Like, was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and enthusiasm and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza? Yeah, you know, he was born and raised in Gaza, studied water engineering in Gaza, and left for a small time to go be a water engineer abroad. After the Oslo Accords are signed, he sees this as his opportunity to come home and to put his engineering abilities to work in Gaza.

He's there raising a family, and he describes, you know, the beginning as a very heady time.

There was an idea that the Palestinian Authority was in charge and that they were going to be able to build a water system. Can you remember that time? Of course.
And I remember we put a plan, five years plan, short term, long term for the water sector in Palestine. Remember that I was in a team consisting of of around 11 persons.
No, we had seven male and four female. And we are sitting in a hotel, and it's like the hotel is like an office, because there was no office at the time.
We used to work till midnight on a daily basis.

We believed in the peace process. We believed that this process will continue on.
Will end with something good. That was the part that just kind of like hit me in my heart.
When he described to me like they were young, they were full of hope. And he talks about getting plans from other small nations so that they can, they can, you know, get an example of what are the other lessons learned? What are the things that we should be thinking about? And I don't know, could you imagine, like we've studied to be water engineers and now we get to build our home's water system.
That's an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most, bringing water to people for your own people in your own country.
That's a very powerful experience. Yes, but more than a decade later, in 2006, Hamas wins an election, and with that comes a period of violence between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Eventually, Hamas controls Gaza, but the Palestinian Water Authority was allowed, I should say, by Hamas to continue doing its work. And I think this is because they knew that the PWA knew what to do.
They had the engineers, and people need water. And Marwan, he essentially keeps his head down during this time.
What is it about him that just, did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations? I think Marwan's someone who just feels a great responsibility, a great responsibility to the people of Gaza and also to his own family. I am talking about myself.
All the time I'm running away from issues to the professional life, to the work, just not to keep thinking on personal issues because it's like you will be burned by just thinking. This is like your safe place is to think about the water issues.
Yes, this is the safest. I think it is a safe place to be, to think about the thing that you have control over and you know what to do.
And it's based on plans and it's based on equations. And, you know, yes, sometimes it's based on diplomatic effort and trying to get other countries to help you.

But it's all in service of something that is a clear human necessity, which is water.

And that is not something to him that is political.

And yet we are at this moment where politics will be the determining factor of whether people in Gaza will have access to water. Marwan is still working in what capacity he can for the water sector in Gaza from Cairo, but how long that will last is unknown.
When and if Palestinians like him will be able to go back to Gaza is unknown.

And the precariousness of this political moment for Gaza,

it's really hard to overstate.

Claudine, thank you so much for coming on today.

Thanks for having me on to talk about this.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank.

It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio,

and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.