The New York Times · New York, New York · 15 August 1998

CP-1998-023

Water Divides Haves From Have-Nots in West Bank

By DOUGLAS JEHL

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Transcribed from the clipping

HEBRON, West Bank, Aug. 13 — In the unrelenting heat of what has been an unforgiving summer, water should spell relief. But in this city of 200,000, most taps ran dry a month ago, just as record temperatures took hold, soaring day after day to nearly 100 degrees.

That would have spelled misery anywhere, but what has made it worse on the West Bank is that Palestinians cannot help but notice that they are the only ones so parched. There is no sign of a water shortage in the Jewish settlements just outside Hebron. There and in Israel as a whole, residents still water lawns and wash their cars.

Yet most water for the Palestinians still flows through Israeli pipes, and by the time it gets to cities like Hebron these days, there is barely a trickle left. It was only 18 months ago that the Palestinians celebrated an agreement that brought Hebron under their control, making it the last of seven West Bank cities to come under Palestinian self-rule.

This summer, with cisterns empty, showers a luxury and fresh laundry a distant dream, many are learning basic lessons about the limitations of an incomplete peace.

“We don’t clean; we don’t wash our clothes; we don’t use the water for anything but drinking,” said Jibrin Kaffrawi, a 32-year-old electrician, who had embarked with his wife and seven children on a quest for water at almost any price. “But still there is not enough to go around, because it is all in the hands of the Jews.”

Israel still controls nearly all the water resources in the West Bank, including three enormous aquifers, just as it did during years of direct rule when it occupied all of the territory. Simply to dig a new well is prohibited unless a Palestinian can first negotiate a host of political and technical restrictions.

The extent to which the Palestinians will acquire water rights is supposed to be part of a final peace settlement. Until then, access to most fresh water is governed by a 1995 agreement that requires Israel to make available a fixed amount of water — slightly over one billion cubic feet a year — to meet the Palestinians’ “immediate needs.”

That arrangement leaves big gaps.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or dateline rule is visible in the clipping — it begins at the headline. The story’s own dateline reads “HEBRON, West Bank, Aug. 13”, which is consistent with publication on Aug. 15, 1998. The photo credit reads “Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times”, which confirms the paper.

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