The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza

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Nearly every day this past week, I've talked on the phone with a man named Marwan.

Hello.

Hello.

Oh, can you hear me?

Yes.

Oh,

good evening, Marwan.

His full name is Marwan Bardawil.

He's 60 and he lives in Gaza, where the phone connection is understandably spotty right now.

The problem is that the networks are so weak.

Marwan has a very specific job.

He's not a political or military figure.

He's not a foreign policy expert or an activist.

Marwan is an engineer, specifically a water engineer for the Palestinian Water Authority.

And his job is to get water to the 2 million people that live in Gaza, which is hard, even in normal times.

Gaza sits between a dry desert and the salty Mediterranean, so they have to pump groundwater up from below.

But over 97% of that water doesn't meet the water quality standards of the World Health Organization.

It's often salty, brackish, or contaminated.

The plants needed to clean that water require fuel, which is in very short supply right now.

And the only other major reliable source of clean water comes from three pipes controlled by Israel, which the day the war started, Israel turned off.

I'm Hanna Rosen, and for this episode of Radio Atlantic, my phone calls with Marwan as he tries to keep the water flowing in Gaza.

The humanitarian crisis there right now is overwhelming.

The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 8,700 people have been killed so far.

Food and fuel are running out.

And if Marwan can't get enough water to the right places, it gets much worse.

We are very close to a public health disaster.

And

the number of impacted people will be huge to the limit that the health authorities in Gaza cannot go with.

Without enough clean water, people get dehydrated.

hygiene deteriorates, sewage backs up.

Palestinians are already crowded into schools and shelters, seeking refuge from the war.

Take away clean water, and soon cholera and other deadly diseases could spike.

Israel has ruled out allowing basic resources or humanitarian aid into Gaza until Hamas releases the hostages it abducted during the weekend.

In the days after Hamas's terror attack, Israel cut off utilities in Gaza.

Israel's sustained bombardment has now killed more than 1,400 people.

But Israel's energy minister has insisted no electricity, fuel, or water supplies will be turned on until the hostages are home.

So when I began talking to Marwan last week, I wanted to know exactly what he saw at that moment.

One of the thousand pipes goes down from 700 cubic meters per hour to zero.

Other line, 800 cubic meters per hour goes to zero.

The third one, one thousand four hundred cubic meter per hour goes to zero.

You could see that immediately?

So it's a matter of two minutes after they close it.

With fuel about to be in short supply, these three pipes from Israel are Gaza's lifeline.

This is the first time they they did such a thing.

That they they took a decision on a higher level, which is not technical.

That means it's it's not uh a a matter of hours or days.

That means we have to look for managing the water without this source.

But then several days later, one of these pipes got turned back on.

It was a huge relief for Marwan.

How or why they got one back, he's not thinking about that.

He's just doing the math.

Hospitals, houses, stores all need water.

Two million people in Gaza need water.

And and one pipe is better than none.

I don't want to imagine that this pipeline will be cut off again.

I don't want to have

a nightmare while I am wake up.

What we have today is this pipeline is functioning as normal, and I hope that this will stay.

At this point, it was Wednesday, October 25th.

And as we were talking, there was one functioning pipe.

How many more days until there wouldn't be enough clean water to go around?

At this hour, if things are remaining like this,

after

three, four days,

the disaster is there.

A month ago, Marwan and his wife were empty nesters.

Their son and daughter had both moved out, gotten married, and had children.

They would visit at least once a week and occasionally take vacations together.

Now, they're all together in a small apartment in South Gaza.

The kids are understandably confused.

Where did our old rooms go?

Why can't we take a bath every night before bed, like we used to?

The answer is not so kid-friendly and runs through Marwan's head all day.

They have a little more than one gallon of water for six adults and two children, and that has to last for two days.

The first thing you stop doing is having shower.

You back maybe 100 years ago when there were no showers.

And so on.

You start to make the kids as the first priority, not you.

So instead of drinking a lot of coffees and teas and other drinks, you stop doing that, or you do it once a day or twice a day.

You stop cooking

type of food that consume water.

Relatively speaking, he and his family are lucky.

Marwan is able to pay for a private water company with a solar-powered desalination machine to fill up the building's water tank once in a while.

That is a luxury.

When Israel started bombing Gaza, they told civilians in the north to move south.

But about two-thirds of Gazans live below the poverty line.

So, unlike Marwan, many can't afford to rent a temporary apartment in the south, much less buy private stores of water.

Instead, a lot of Gazans are cramped into makeshift shelters in schools and hospitals.

The way they get their water is they walk for miles looking for an open water station and then carry those gallon jugs back to the shelter.

Even before this war, the majority of Gaza's health problems came from contaminated water.

Marwan hears from his engineers in the field that skin diseases are already starting to show up at the shelters.

That's a first sign of worse problems to come.

Some civilians couldn't find to drink, or they have very limited water to drink, or to clean the wallet after they use it.

So there is a potential of

insects to grow on that wallet.

the smell, the gases that are produced from the sewage.

So from the moment he wakes up, Marwan is on the phone to the Red Cross, to contacts in the West Bank, to engineers on the ground, to the UN,

asking if there are any desalination plants working, if any pipes burst today.

Should the water that day be diverted to the hospital or the bakeries or the shelters?

Now, every once in a while, people show up at his door asking for water.

They figure he works in the water authority.

He must have access to some magic tap that keeps the water flowing in his apartment at all times.

They think that, of course, you just make a phone call and the water comes, which is not the case.

Marwan has actually seen his own water run down to zero.

A water engineer without running water, relying on a couple of ordinary water bottles.

In the last 20 days, more than three times we experience a time with no water closed.

And what happens on a day like that?

You're nervous.

It's a hard day.

It's a very, very hard day to

you cannot explain it.

You cannot explain how.

Spend the time and uh

to try

use the minimum of the water.

I call Marwan the next day.

The math has accelerated.

Yeah, i if you are talking about numbers, one day is past, so it's minus one.

Yesterday we are talking about three days, today we are talking about two days.

Tomorrow we will talk about one day.

And that's it.

It's like you are running fast to the edge of the

hole.

That day started with a whole new problem.

A pipe burst near a cluster of apartment buildings.

An engineer in the field sent him a picture, which I asked Marwan to describe to me.

A street full of sewage.

It's like a small lake of sewage.

And does someone live on that street?

Yeah, yeah, a street where people live.

On a normal, non-wartime day, this is an easy problem.

You call an emergency technician, they bring in a suction truck to clean up the mess, disinfect the area, and then replace the pipe.

I asked him if he could do that now.

No, we cannot do anything.

We cannot even

reach the place.

We just wait till it evaporates.

Nothing to do with

it's beyond your capabilities, beyond your control.

You know that this is will

harm the people, but

what we can do?

Nothing.

And it's not time to blame yourself because uh what's happening is much beyond uh beyond us.

We as as as civilians, as

pure technical people

responsible for water, we just concentrate on providing water to the people and not more.

So, of course, we can fix engineering problem,

but it's not the

right situation to think that way.

We just hope that all this ends.

And we hope that

people and the civilians not to be

the side that lose everything,

their lives or their health.

Marwan sometimes goes to conferences with Israeli water technicians.

They share a border, which means they share some other things, like an aquifer, runoff, and pipes.

At these conferences, Marwan says the tone is pretty collegial.

They speak technical English, trade tips about water management.

What's unspoken is the power dynamic.

Israel controls construction materials flowing in and out of Gaza, which are needed to repair and update these water systems.

Nothing comes in or out without Israeli approval.

And we are technical persons.

We just

respect that this is the rule and this is the frame that we have.

Even if we don't know exactly what the reasons behind that sometimes it's not understandable

so it's we do our best to

to do

things the right way why do you respect the rule

it's not a matter of why it's a matter we don't have choices we are the controlling power

Marwan is 60 and he's seen Gaza go through a lot of changes.

When he was a kid, he used to go fishing at the beach.

I remember fishing with other fishermen, watching them all the time,

swimming, try to learn riding waves.

He's never taken his grandkids to that beach.

It was highly polluted by sewage water and unswimmable for years.

Although a year ago, after a massive international cleanup effort, Gazans did start swimming there again.

And many reported that for the first time in years, the water looked blue.

I wanted to hear more about his childhood, but it was by then almost midnight Gaza time.

Marwan was sounding tired, though he was too polite to say so.

We hope, pray all,

every moment, not only for the people of Gaza, but for the people of all the regions to have

normal, safe life.

Which looks,

by the way, after all these disasters for more than 75 years,

I think the time is

now for solving this forever.

Not just a few years and then back again to this fight in which

if we will continue like this, there will be no end.

I said good night and take care to Marwan.

I would talk to him the next day.

But then when I called, I heard a recording.

The mobile number you have diagnosed can be reached at the moment.

You can leave a voice message by calling, search, then the mobile number.

More from Gaza after the break.

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Good evening and thank you for joining us.

We begin tonight with a major escalation in the Israel-Hamas war and what may turn out to be the next phase in a long and grueling battle.

Israel unleashing a massive wave of airstrikes as it expands its ground operations in Gaza as well.

Meanwhile, Gaza is facing a near-total communications blackout, cutting Palestinians off from the outside world and, of course, cutting them off from each other.

Marwan, this is Hannah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I couldn't, we couldn't reach you for we couldn't reach you.

Is everyone safe?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What was it?

What happened in the last few days?

They discommissed all the internet and communications from Friday noon to Sunday morning.

Marwan explains to me how they felt that weekend.

And the word he used was blind.

No calls in or out, no reaching the Red Cross or the UN, no reaching family, no reaching the guy who brings the water tank to their apartment, no way of knowing what was going on outside their walls.

But now, with the phones back on, Marwan had work to do.

He had to take care of a damaged pipeline.

Suri, can we talk later?

Yes, of course, yes, of course.

I have to take care of some of the damage in one of the pipelines.

This was on Monday.

The Israelis had opened up a second pipe, and a spokesperson with the Israeli Defense Forces said that now these two open pipes should provide enough water to meet basic humanitarian needs.

But the second pipe was damaged.

So Marwan had to find a technician to fix it.

We reconnected later in the day.

Yeah, I just hope that this pipeline will

start functioning tomorrow.

Is this a big relief or it's just small?

It will serve the population around a quarter million.

Oh, good.

That's good.

It's a big one, yes.

That's good.

It was a good moment.

A quarter million people getting clean water would be a huge relief.

But when we spoke the next day, the pipe still wasn't running.

And the first pipe, that one was down too.

Marwan told me it was a technical issue.

He said both should be running soon.

But the reality was that for now, at the moment he and I were talking, they were back to where they'd been at the start of the war.

Zero pipes working.

People are in need, really in need, for each drop of water.

People cannot practice their normal hygiene practices, and this surely will impact their health.

Right.

So, every drop of water is important.

Are you okay?

Did you get sick?

Yeah, I got the flu.

Oh, no.

I'm very sorry.

It's one of the time for us, but you know, the environment are full of dust.

Every time I called him, he seemed more exhausted, which makes complete sense.

Gazans are depending on him.

His neighbors are depending on him.

His family is depending on him.

He's physically tired, but also just thoroughly exhausted.

We deserve a life which is suitable for human beings.

We deserve a better life.

When peace policy started back in 1993,

the majority of the Palestinians dreamed that maybe this is the time that we

have the same opportunity as others.

And we dreamed that maybe this is the chance, but

things

went beyond the control of the normal people.

We are the normal people.

We are not the player of this game.

We are not the players of this game.

That evening, we talked some more.

He told me about times he traveled to Europe to learn more about water management.

And he told me he wasn't sure his kids would want to raise their families in Gaza.

After about 20 minutes, I wanted to let Marwan get some rest.

He told me he was the only one still awake in his house.

While we were talking, his wife, kids, and grandkids had all gone to sleep.

Everybody's sleeping, just you're not sleeping?

Yeah, because sleeping nowadays is like when you have the opportunity to sleep, you jump to the bed.

So you don't know when things are deteriorated around you.

voices and the bumping could be closed.

Even if you feel that you are far away from anything,

the atmosphere, the environment around you, you scary.

So you just can't hear anything.

It's very quiet, so everyone just goes to bed.

Yes, I think you caught me in the last moment before I went to sleep.

Okay, Marwan, you know what?

Go to sleep.

I think maybe you should go to sleep because you're also sick.

So why don't you go to sleep and sleep well while it is quiet?

And if we need to, I will call you again tomorrow.

You are welcome.

Okay, thank you so much.

And I hope you rest.

You are welcome.

You are welcome.

Okay, bye.

At the time of this recording, Wednesday, November the 1st, we couldn't get the latest water update from Marwan.

Gaza was under another communications blackout.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Abade, engineered by Rob Smirciak, fact-checked by Sam Fendress.

Claudine is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and we'll be back next week.