The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza
Numbers are one way to make the destruction of war legible: number of hostages, number of children killed, number of buildings destroyed, number of aid trucks that made it across the Egyptian border. For Marwan Bardawil, who lives in Gaza, the unit of peril he tracks is cubic meters per hour. Bardawil is a water engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority overseeing Gaza. And these days he is measuring, in cubic meters per hour, the quantity of water flowing through the pipes that, in prewar time, carried 10 percent of Gazans’ drinking water—pipes that are controlled by Israel. Right now, with other water sources dwindling, those pipes are Gaza’s lifeline. “The people are really in need of each drop of water,” he told me.
For the past week, I’ve been checking in with Bardawil every day as he struggles to find clean sources of water. (You can hear our phone conversations on this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic). In the best of times, Bardawil’s job is difficult. Gaza sits between a desert and the Mediterranean Sea, so groundwater must be pumped from an aquifer. After years of overuse, even before the war began, 97 percent of the aquifer water didn’t meet quality standards from the World Health Organization. Making it safe to drink requires fuel, which isn’t abundant in Gaza. The other major reliable source of clean water is those pipes, three in total.
In other words, the water supply in Gaza was already fragile even before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Overnight, as Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign began, the fuel required for water desalination became very scarce. Israel controls the flow of materials in and out of Gaza, and fuel has many potential wartime uses. Bardawil, meanwhile, kept his eye on those pipes. That first day, he called the engineer who was monitoring the central computer. Within two minutes, the cubic meters in all three had dropped down to zero.
Sometimes neighbors show up at the apartment he is renting in South Gaza with his wife, children, and grandchildren. They
