Palestinians used 86.3 litres of water per person per day in 2021, against the 100 litres per person per day cited as the World Health Organization’s reference minimum, on the joint measurement the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority published in 2023. The same release records that 22% of all the water available in the Palestinian territories that year was purchased from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, and that Palestinians have had no access to the Jordan River since 1967, a loss the two bodies estimate at about 250 million cubic metres a year. Electricity runs through a comparable structure of purchase and transfer, part of it recorded in the 1994 Protocol on Economic Relations that both parties signed. What arrives at a household tap comes down to litres a day and hours of pumping, and almost every figure that describes those quantities is published by one of the two parties to the arrangement.
Key Findings
- Domestic water use across the Palestinian territories was 86.3 litres per person per day in 2021, 89.0 in the West Bank and 82.7 in Gaza, per the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority (2023), against the 100-litre reference the same release cites.
- Palestinians purchased 22% of all water available in the territories from Mekorot, the Israeli national water company, in 2021, on the same two bodies’ own accounting (2023).
- The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995 fixed 28.6 million cubic metres a year of additional water for Palestinian use during the interim period, against the 70 to 80 million cubic metres a year the same article records as the agreed estimate of future needs, and made every new well conditional on the prior approval of a Joint Water Committee that decides by consensus.
- 4% of Gaza’s population had access to safe and clean water before 7 October 2023, per the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (2024).
- 42.1% of Gaza’s 152 water facilities sustained damage in the 46 days from 7 October to 22 November 2023, on the satellite-radar analysis of Asi and colleagues (2024, peer-reviewed).
How much water does each Palestinian use per day?
Palestinians used 86.3 litres of water per person per day for domestic purposes in 2021, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority reported in their joint World Water Day release of 2023, against the 100 litres per person per day the same release cites as the World Health Organization’s reference minimum. The shortfall on those two figures is 13.7 litres a person a day.
The two bodies publish the figure by region: 89.0 litres per person per day in the West Bank and 82.7 in the Gaza Strip. A later release by the two bodies, for World Water Day 2024, gives 84.6 litres per person per day in Gaza in 2022, the last full year before 7 October 2023. The two Gaza figures are consecutive years from two releases, and a change of under 2 litres between them is too small to read as a trend.
Three limits travel with all of these numbers. They measure domestic consumption only, which is the water that reaches households, and not the agricultural and industrial abstraction that dominates total use in both economies. They are the Palestinian statistical authority’s own counts, published by a party to the arrangement they describe, and they are not independently verified. And the denominator underneath every per-capita figure is a projection rather than a count: the last full enumeration of the territories was the Bureau’s own Population, Housing and Establishments Census of 1 December 2017, which counted 4,780,978 residents, and every population figure since is modelled forward from that base.
Is it true Israel controls 85% of Palestinian water resources?
It is often said that Israel controls 85% of Palestinian water resources. The figure is real and its publishers are named: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority put it in their joint World Water Day release of 2023, where it appears as the share of Palestinian water resources under Israeli control. It is the Palestinian authorities’ own reporting, and it describes resources rather than household supply.
Directionally, the rest of the record supports a picture of extensive control, and the quantities that carry their own bases are the ones to work from. The 1995 interim agreement makes the licensing and drilling of every new well, any increase in extraction from any source, and any development of water resources or systems conditional on the prior approval of the Joint Water Committee, in which each side holds an equal number of representatives and in which, by the agreement’s own paragraph 14, all decisions are reached by consensus. The same two Palestinian bodies report in the same release that 22% of available water was bought from the Israeli national company. They report no access to the Jordan River since 1967.
What the 85% does not carry is a volume. It is published as a share, without an accompanying quantity in cubic metres, so it cannot be set against the aquifer figures the 1995 agreement tabulates or converted into a per-person loss. A reader who wants to know how much water is at stake, rather than what proportion of it sits behind an approval requirement, has to go to the quantities that name their own denominators, and those are the purchase share, the interim allocation and the per-capita measurements. Each of the three is published, dated and checkable, and each belongs to a different body or instrument.
What does the 1995 signed agreement allocate to each side?
The agreement both parties signed in Washington on 28 September 1995 made available 28.6 million cubic metres a year of additional water during the interim period, against the 70 to 80 million cubic metres a year the same article records as an agreed estimate of future Palestinian needs in the West Bank.
Article 40 of that agreement opens with two sentences that have to be read together. The first: “Israel recognizes the Palestinian water rights in the West Bank.” The second: “These will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations and settled in the Permanent Status Agreement relating to the various water resources.” Paragraph 5 defers ownership of water and sewage infrastructure the same way.
The 28.6 million cubic metres is itemised in the text, and the itemisation splits into two kinds of line. Quantities Israel undertook to supply total 9.5 million cubic metres a year across Hebron and Bethlehem, Ramallah, Salfit, Nablus, a new well at Jenin and 5 million to the Gaza Strip; quantities the Palestinian side was made responsible for developing total 19.1 million, chiefly 17 million for Hebron, Bethlehem and Ramallah from the Eastern Aquifer or other agreed sources. Those two sums, which are this report’s addition of the agreement’s own lines, reconcile exactly to the published total.
Schedule 8 required the Joint Water Committee to prepare, within three months of signing, a schedule of extraction quotas based on existing licences, and to update it yearly. No such published schedule was located. Schedule 10, the table most often read as the allocation, is headed “Data Concerning Aquifers”, reports three West Bank aquifers with a total annual recharge of 679 million cubic metres, and closes: “All figures are average annual estimates.”
Two scope limits matter. Article 40 governs the West Bank; paragraph 25 leaves Gaza’s prior arrangements “unchanged”. And the arrangement is an interim one, written alongside a redeployment schedule of 18 months and permanent-status talks due to begin by 4 May 1996, which is why any reading of who holds jurisdiction over the resource turns on a question the text itself left open.
How much Palestinian water is bought from Israel’s water company?
22% of all the water available in the Palestinian territories in 2021 was purchased from Mekorot, the Israeli national water company, on the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Palestinian Water Authority’s own accounting published in 2023. More than one litre in five of the supply reaching Palestinian households was therefore bought from the other party to the agreement that governs its abstraction.
The purchase is structural rather than incidental, and the 1995 text is where that structure is written down. Of the 28.6 million cubic metres a year the agreement made available for the interim period, 9.5 million are Israeli supply undertakings to named West Bank towns, and a further 5 million are an Israeli undertaking to the Gaza Strip that the text says will in future “come from desalination in Israel”. Schedule 11, which covers Gaza, leaves the water systems supplying the settlements and the military installation area to be “operated and managed by Mekoroth Water Co.” The same company appears on both sides of the line the agreement draws.
The official releases cited here price none of this. They report the purchased share of volume and do not publish what households pay, so the frequently repeated claim that Palestinians buy water from tankers at higher cost has no figure in this record: no Palestinian or Israeli statistical series located here reports tanker prices, the share of households buying from tankers, or a comparison between tanker and network tariffs. The measurable quantity is the 22%, and it describes dependence at the level of the system rather than the household bill.
Two labels belong on the figure. It is a share of water available, not of water consumed, so it sits on a different base from the 86.3 litres per person per day. And it is the Palestinian authority’s own accounting of its own purchases, which is a party reporting a transaction it is party to.
Which water source has been closed to Palestinian use since 1967?
Palestinians have had no access to the Jordan River since 1967, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority put the resulting loss at about 250 million cubic metres a year in their 2023 joint release. That figure is an estimate by the two Palestinian bodies of water not taken, not a metered abstraction, and it is published without a method alongside it.
Its usefulness is as a scale. The 250 million cubic metres a year the two bodies estimate is roughly nine times the 28.6 million cubic metres a year the 1995 agreement made available for the whole interim period, and about 37% of the 679 million cubic metres of average annual recharge that Schedule 10 of the same agreement records for the three West Bank aquifers combined. Those are different classes of source, a surface river against groundwater, so the river estimate is not a substitute for the aquifer figures and the two do not sum into a supply total. Set side by side, they indicate that the closed source is of the same order as the aquifer system the agreement does tabulate.
The river is absent from the allocation machinery entirely. Article 40’s Schedule 10 covers the Eastern, North-Eastern and Western aquifers and no surface water, and its Eastern Aquifer lines that read “In the Jordan Valley” describe wells and springs in the valley rather than abstraction from the river itself. The Joint Water Committee’s approval regime under Schedule 8 reaches wells, extraction increases and system development, all of which presuppose a source inside that tabulation.
So the single largest volume the Palestinian authorities name in their own release is a volume that the signed instrument governing Palestinian water neither allocates nor mentions, and the rights question over “the various water resources” was, by the text’s own words, referred to permanent-status negotiations that had not concluded.
How much of Palestinian electricity is imported?
87.6% of the electricity available in Palestine in 2022 was imported, in the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics table compiled from Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority data.
That share is 7,212,121 of 8,232,713 megawatt-hours. A further 608,000 megawatt-hours, 7.4%, was bought from the Palestine Electric Company, and 412,592, 5.0%, came from self-generation and renewables. The series runs from 2011, and the imported share has held in the same range throughout: 4,621,686 of 5,191,018 megawatt-hours in 2011, 89.0%, against 87.6% in 2022, while the total available rose by more than half. The table does not split imports by supplying country, so it cannot say on its own how much came from Israel rather than from Jordan or Egypt. It is the Palestinian authorities’ own compilation, published by a party to the arrangement it describes.
Gaza’s own generation runs on fuel that arrives by truck through crossings Israel administers and counts. The Humanitarian Aid workbook on COGAT’s Gaza Aid Data portal records 335 fuel tanker-trucks entering the Strip between 1 November 2023 and 31 May 2024, on this report’s count of the rows COGAT publishes, with a further 598 rows of gas tanker-trucks. Those counts are floors, because the sheet codes a nil day sometimes with a dash and sometimes with an empty cell, and they are a party’s own operational record. COGAT’s method note of 9 July 2026 states that pallet numbers “are counted and contents are compared to the coordination requests and self-reports during the security clearance”, while tonnages rest on “the self-declaration of humanitarian organizations and private sector providers”. The same portal records that no aid entered the Strip between 2 March and 19 May 2025.
The quantities have a written counterpart only on the fiscal side. The Protocol on Economic Relations signed in Paris on 29 April 1994 clears import taxes to the Palestinian side “within six working days from the day of collection”, and its 1995 Supplement adds that “Israel will deduct 3% from each transfer” for administrative costs. The Protocol contains no withholding power and no suspension clause. No instrument read for this report sets out how imported electricity itself is priced or paid for, so the megawatt-hours above carry no price, and the physical entry of goods through the crossings is a separate arrangement documented by one party.
How do power cuts reach a household’s drinking water?
4% of Gaza’s population had access to safe and clean water before 7 October 2023, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported in its World Water Day release of 2024. Water quality in the Strip depends on plant that runs on electricity and fuel, which is the mechanism connecting a power cut to a tap.
A United Nations University working paper on Gaza’s water security by Sarsour and colleagues (2025), whose co-authors include the director of Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, sets out the chain in the order it runs. Desalination units, groundwater pumps and wastewater treatment works all require electricity; when supply to those units is interrupted, the paper records reductions in the quantity of water delivered and deterioration in its quality, because untreated or partially treated water enters the distribution and disposal systems. The paper describes an association between energy interruption and water outcomes, and does not present it as a measured causal coefficient.
Both parties’ own records put desalination at the centre of Gaza’s supply. The 1995 agreement, three decades earlier, already anticipated it, providing that the 5 million cubic metres a year Israel undertook to supply to the Strip would in future “come from desalination in Israel”. COGAT’s ceasefire report of 9 July 2026 states that more than 70,000 cubic metres of water a day were being facilitated through external water lines and desalination facilities, excluding local wells, as of that report. That is COGAT’s own figure, published by a party to the events, and it counts what was facilitated rather than what reached households.
The dependency therefore runs in one direction through three stages: power and fuel reach the pumps and the desalination and treatment plant, that plant determines both the volume and the quality of what enters the network, and the network determines what a household receives. The Bureau’s 4% measures the far end of that chain before October 2023, on the Bureau’s own definition of safe and clean water.
How much less do off-grid West Bank communities receive?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Water Authority publish 89.0 litres per person per day as the 2021 West Bank average and no community-level breakdown beneath it. The figure that circulates for communities not connected to the network, 26 litres per person per day, comes from “Parched: Israel’s policy of water deprivation in the West Bank,” published on 31 May 2023 by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation with an advocacy mission.
That report sets its 26 litres against roughly 82.4 litres per person per day in grid-connected areas. The two figures are widely relayed, and the report names no statistical office behind either measurement. An earlier factsheet by the Palestinian organisation Al-Haq, published in 2012, reported approximately 73 litres per person per day for West Bank Palestinians, about 300 litres inside Israel and about 369 litres for Israeli settlers in the territory, and reported that roughly 50,000 Palestinians in 151 West Bank communities were living on less than 20 litres per person per day, which it set against the World Health Organization’s short-term emergency minimum. Those are one advocacy organisation’s own figures on its own definitions, they are fourteen years old, and they are not an official statistical series.
What is absent is the series that would settle the question. No official statistical publication located for this report, Palestinian or Israeli, reports domestic water consumption for individual West Bank communities or for the unconnected population as a class. The Bureau publishes national and regional means; the connected-versus-unconnected split, the most-repeated quantity in the whole subject, exists in the record only as an advocacy estimate.
The one thing all of these numbers share is the benchmark. The 100-litre reference attributed to the World Health Organization appears in the Palestinian authorities’ own release and in the advocacy publications alike, which is what makes the figures legible against each other at all. It is a reference standard rather than a measurement of anything, and the underlying World Health Organization document was not read for this report.
What did the 2026 damage assessment record for water and power?
42.1% of Gaza’s 152 water facilities sustained damage in the 46 days from 7 October to 22 November 2023, on the satellite-radar analysis Asi and colleagues published in the peer-reviewed journal Conflict and Health in 2024.
In the same window, 36.8% of those facilities met the study’s threshold for functional destruction, which the authors define as a detected damage area of 50% or more read off satellite imagery rather than a verified loss of service. Damage was concentrated in the north: 70% of North Gaza’s 33 water facilities and 64.4% of Gaza governorate’s 45 sustained direct damage, against 16.2% across the three southern governorates that the evacuation order of 13 October 2023 designated as the evacuation zone. The authors state plainly that the absence of ground-truth data “prevents the ability to quantify the accuracy of satellite radar-based damage assessments”, and their facility denominators come from open-source humanitarian inventories rather than an official register, so the percentages move with the inventory. The window is 46 days of the first phase only, and these are not war-total figures.
For the war as a whole, the Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment conducted jointly by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union, published in April 2026 and covering October 2023 to October 2025, puts physical infrastructure damages at US$35.2 billion and economic and social losses at US$22.7 billion, and estimates recovery and reconstruction needs at US$71.4 billion over the next decade, including US$26.3 billion in the first eighteen months. The assessment’s published headline figures are aggregates across sectors, and needs and damages measure different things: one is a forward-looking estimate of what rebuilding would cost, the other an assessment estimate of what was destroyed. They are never summed, and neither is a record of money spent or pledged.
Methodology and limitations
This report measures the published record on Palestinian water and electricity supply: what each body counts, on what base, and for what period. It does not assess the legality of any arrangement described.
The source types are five. Official Palestinian statistical releases, chiefly the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Palestinian Water Authority joint World Water Day release of 2023 (reporting 2021 data) and the Bureau’s 2024 release, supply the per-capita, purchase-share and Jordan River figures; these are a national statistical office’s own counts, published by a party to the arrangement, and are not independently verified. Two signed instruments supply the allocation and clearance provisions: the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, Annex III Article 40 with Schedules 8 to 11, and the Protocol on Economic Relations of 29 April 1994 with its 1995 Supplement, both quoted from the English text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to them. A Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics table compiled from Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority data supplies the electricity figures. A party’s own operational records supply the fuel counts and the ceasefire-period water figure, both COGAT’s. One peer-reviewed study (Asi and colleagues, 2024) and one institutional working paper (Sarsour and colleagues, United Nations University, 2025) supply the infrastructure and mechanism findings. One joint intergovernmental assessment, by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union in April 2026, supplies the damage and needs totals.
Specific limits carried into the prose above: every per-capita figure rests on a population projected from the 2017 census rather than enumerated; the 85% share is published without a volume base; the extraction-quota schedule Schedule 8 required within three months of signing was not located; the 26-litre and 73-litre figures are advocacy estimates naming no statistical office; Asi and colleagues cannot quantify the accuracy of satellite detection and cover 46 days; the COGAT fuel sums are floors over an ambiguously coded sheet and are this report’s addition of published rows; the assessment’s needs figures are forward-looking. The World Health Organization’s 100-litre reference is carried as the Palestinian release cites it, and that organisation’s own document was not read.
Conclusion
In 2021, 86.3 litres a person a day came out of the tap across the Palestinian territories, 89.0 in the West Bank and 82.7 in Gaza, measured and published by the Palestinian authorities themselves, against a 100-litre reference those same authorities put on the page beside it. That is the answer to the question the report opened on.
The rest of the record describes how that quantity is arrived at, and it is consistent across every axis measured here. More than a fifth of the water available was bought from the other party’s national utility. The signed agreement that governs West Bank abstraction made 28.6 million cubic metres a year available against the 70 to 80 million it itself recorded as the future need, recognised Palestinian water rights in one sentence and deferred them in the next, and made every new well conditional on a committee that decides by consensus. The largest volume the Palestinian authorities name, about 250 million cubic metres a year of Jordan River water, belongs to a source that agreement does not tabulate. Almost nine-tenths of the electricity was imported in 2022, and in Gaza the rest depends on fuel counted by the other party at its own crossings. At the far end of the chain, 4% of Gaza’s population had safe and clean water before October 2023, and 42.1% of the Strip’s water facilities were damaged within the following 46 days.
Set all of that beside the one figure everybody repeats, the 26 litres a day in communities off the network, and the gap in the record becomes the sharpest thing in it. That number has no statistical publisher. The two governments each count what they administer, the advocacy reports count what the governments do not, and nobody publishes a household-level series for the places where the shortfall is said to be worst. A litre a day is the most concrete quantity in this entire dispute. Whose job is it to measure it, community by community, and what does it mean that after three decades of a signed water regime the answer is nobody’s?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do two official figures for Gaza’s per-capita water differ?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Palestinian Water Authority release of 2023 gives 82.7 litres per person per day for Gaza in 2021, while the two bodies’ 2024 release gives 84.6 litres per person per day for Gaza in 2022. They are consecutive years from two releases, and the change between them is too small to read as a trend.
Was the extraction quota schedule the 1995 agreement required ever published?
Schedule 8 of Article 40 required the Joint Water Committee to prepare a schedule of extraction quotas within three months of signing, based on existing licences and permits, and to update it yearly. No such published schedule was located for this report. The table often read as the allocation, Schedule 10, is headed “Data Concerning Aquifers” and closes by stating that all its figures are average annual estimates.
Does the 1995 agreement cover Gaza’s water?
Only marginally. Article 40 is a West Bank instrument throughout, and its paragraph 25 provides that the existing arrangements for Gaza “shall remain unchanged”, as detailed in Schedule 11. The one Gaza quantity inside Article 40 is the 5 million cubic metres a year Israel undertook to supply, which the text says will in future come from desalination in Israel.
How many aquifers does the signed agreement tabulate, and how much water?
Three: the Eastern, North-Eastern and Western aquifers, with totals of 172, 145 and 362 million cubic metres a year respectively and, in the agreement’s own words, a total annual recharge of 679 million cubic metres. Schedule 8 gives those figures their operative force by making them the basis and guidelines for the Joint Water Committee’s decisions.
Why do per-capita water figures rest on projections?
Because the last full enumeration of the West Bank and Gaza was the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics census of 1 December 2017, which counted 4,780,978 residents. Every later population total in the Palestinian and international series is modelled forward from that base, so the denominator of any litres-per-person figure after 2017 is a projection rather than a count.
Where does the 100-litre daily benchmark come from?
It is cited in the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Palestinian Water Authority release of 2023 as the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum for domestic use. It is a reference standard rather than a measurement of any population, and it appears in the advocacy literature on the same subject, which is what allows those publications and the official releases to be read against each other.
Sources
- Asi, Y., Mills, D., Greenough, P. G., Kunichoff, D., Khan, S., and colleagues, 2024. “Nowhere and no one is safe”: spatial analysis of damage to critical civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the Israeli military campaign, 7 October to 22 November 2023. Conflict and Health, volume 18, article 24. DOI 10.1186/s13031-024-00580-x. Peer-reviewed.
- COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), 2024. Humanitarian Aid workbook, Gaza Aid Data portal. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, a party’s own operational count.
- COGAT, 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire, October 2025 to June 2026, 9 July 2026. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, a party’s own reported counts.
- Government of the State of Israel and the PLO, 1994. Protocol on Economic Relations (the Paris Protocol), Paris, 29 April 1994, with the 1995 Supplement (Annex V to the Interim Agreement). gov.il. Primary record, treaty text.
- Israel and the PLO, 1995. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Washington, 28 September 1995, Annex III, Appendix 1, Article 40 and Schedules 8 to 11. gov.il. Primary record, treaty text.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017, final results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national census.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Quantity of Available Electricity in Palestine by Year and Source of Electrical Energy, 2011-2022, published 30 July 2024, from Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority data. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national statistical office.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. The World Water Day, 22 March 2024. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national statistical office.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and Palestinian Water Authority, 2023. The World Water Day, 22 March 2023 (reporting 2021 data). pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national statistical office.
- Sarsour, A., Shoblaq, M., Abuzerr, S., Nagabhatla, N., Herremans, B., and Abuhabib, A., 2025. Parched and Imperiled: Gaza’s Deteriorating Water Security in the Wake of the October 2023 Aggression. United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies, Working Paper No. 05, 2025. unu.edu. Institutional working paper, not peer-reviewed.
- World Bank, United Nations and European Union, 2026. Gaza Strip Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, April 2026. Joint intergovernmental assessment.