The New York Times · New York, New York · 15 July 2000

CP-2000-062

In West Bank, Water Is as Touchy as Land

Parched Villagers Uneasy as Talks Go On

By WILLIAM A. ORME Jr.

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Transcribed from the clipping

KARMEL, West Bank, July 12 — Rafat, a skinny 9-year-old too shy to supply a surname, heads every summer morning to the only swimming hole in this hardscrabble stretch of the Hebron hills. It is a stark stone cistern, about a 100 feet long and 50 feet across, built long ago to store the rains that fall only in winter.

Descending a rickety ladder, Rafat and his pals plunge happily into stagnant water barely three feet deep, its surreal surface an unbroken carpet of brilliant green algae. “These are our children,” said Khalil Yunis, mayor of the nearby town of Yatta, shaking his head at the sight of the small boys diving under the undulating scum.

“And this is their water.” Rafat’s algae-choked swimming pool is the centerpiece of the village water system. The other daily water source for Karmel’s 3,500 residents is a tiny spring-fed brook wending its way through a herd of goats into a newly covered concrete cistern.

The villagers carry pails past a hand-lettered sign in English and Arabic extolling this modest public works project, “implemented by Yatta municipality” and financed by the United States Agency for International Development. “God bless America,” Mr. Yunis said with a wry smile. Mr.

Yunis tried to help Karmel further by linking the village to Yatta’s municipal water system, but the summer supply in Yatta is so low that water now flows through the three-inch pipe here just two or three days a month, the mayor said. Like most of the West Bank, Yatta gets its water from Israel’s state water company.

Dispute over water resources has been a fact of life here since the land was occupied by Israel 33 years ago.

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.

Context added by this archive

Date check: The masthead line reads in full: “A6 L+ THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL SATURDAY, JULY 15, 2000”. This matches both pub and date exactly. The story dateline is “KARMEL, West Bank, July 12”.

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