The Palestinian town of Bruqin, just off Route 446 in the northern West Bank, was founded in the Roman era as a rest stop for passing traders and their camels. Today, this community of fewer than 5,000 residents has – like much of the West Bank – become a site of competition: a case study of the Israeli occupation in miniature. Directly across the road sits Bruqin’s perverse mirror image – the Israeli settlement of Brukhin. Founded in 1998 on confiscated land (belonging, incidentally, to Bruqin), it was considered illegal even by the Israeli state until 2012, when it was granted retroactive authorization. Official figures from 2022 put its population at just short of 2,500 – almost half the size of Bruqin itself.
On 14 May 2025, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on a car carrying pregnant Brukhin resident Tzeela Gez, who died in hospital from her wounds. Her baby, too, died following an emergency Caesarean section. The killing was seized upon by the settler movement’s representatives in national and local government – from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Chairman of the Shomron Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, who used his eulogy at Gez’s funeral to call for the wholesale destruction of Bruqin. In response, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raided the town and imposed a curfew on its residents, many of whom were subjected to violent interrogation. A suspect, Nael Samara, was identified and summarily executed by firing squad three days after Gez’s death. According to witnesses, Samara was handcuffed and blindfolded at the time of his death.
The IDF’s withdrawal on 22 May should have brought an end to the fighting, but this was just the beginning. That night, a mob of around 200 settlers attacked the town – setting fire to cars and homes in what one Bruqin resident described as “a night from hell”. Another told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency that: “The army left the town and the settlers arrived, as if they were exchanging roles and coordinating with each other.” In a statement, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the settlers of acting “under the supervision and protection of the [Israeli] occupation”.
Bruqin is just the latest example of settlers serving as the vanguard of what Amnesty International has called ”a wider pattern of unlawful Israeli policies and practices to dispossess, dominate and oppress Palestinians in the West Bank”. This has only become clearer in the years since 7 October 2023, as settler-led violence has escalated with the tacit support of both the Israeli state and much of wider society. A representative of EcoPeace Middle East, a transnational NGO working to facilitate collaboration on environmental issues across Israel, Palestine and Jordan, told us that: “because [of] what happened on October 7, people started to be confused about moral issues … compassion to the other side is something you don’t see right now.”
This ‘moral confusion’ has not simply enabled acts of overt violence such as those in Bruqin (not to mention the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which as of 9 June has claimed at least 54,927 lives and left a further 126,615 wounded), but has also allowed for punitive restrictions on Palestinians’ access to essential services and utilities in the occupied West Bank. In this context, the emerging dynamics of the occupation – namely, an increase in settler-led attacks on Palestinian people and property alike, with the implicit backing of the Israeli state – can be seen in that most basic of resources: water.
The Mountain Aquifer, a 9,000 square-kilometer underground reservoir underneath the West Bank and much of eastern Israel, is the largest source of groundwater in Israel-Palestine. For centuries, locals have used this water for everything from drinking to irrigation. Whole communities have sprung up around the many natural springs and man-made wells that dot the landscape. Traditionally, these water sources were operated by those same communities, with their output allocated among the group based on need, but that use did not equate to formal ownership.
It was not until the British Mandate of 1920 that attempts were made to standardize ‘water rights’ across historic Palestine. These attempts, while ultimately unsuccessful, were taken up by the new Israeli state following its independence in 1948. The Water Law of 1959 sought to impose a top-down, centralized approach to water management – requiring both new and existing wells to obtain a government permit. This was followed by the creation of the National Water Carrier in 1964, which redirected water from the Jordan Valley to emerging Israeli population centers.
In 1967, the IDF occupied the West Bank, assuming full control over water governance in the territory. The criteria for obtaining a permit to extract water from the Mountain Aquifer were tightened to such an extent that, between 1967 and 2023, just seven new permits for drilling for domestic water consumption were granted to Palestinians. At the same time, existing wells and springs were subject to fixed quotas, freezing their output at 1967 levels. These quotas remain in place and have never been revised. In 1982, oversight of water management in the occupied West Bank was transferred to Israel’s state-owned water company, Mekorot, via military order.
The Oslo II Accord of 1995 obligated both Israeli “recognition” of Palestinian water rights in the West Bank and a bilateral commitment to “coordinated management of water resources”. In practice, though, Israel – via Mekorot and the IDF – retained control over the Mountain Aquifer. Furthermore, the Accord doubled down on the asymmetrical division of shared groundwater reserves, with 80% of extracted water allocated to Israel and just 20% to Palestinians.
Julie Trottier, Director of Research at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), has been writing about water’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict for decades. The approach to allocation enshrined in Oslo II, she told us, is fundamentally flawed: “They said, ‘so many million cubic meters from this aquifer will be used by Israelis and the rest will be used by Palestinians’, as if water were a pie.” Water, though, doesn’t work that way – its use (as distinct from its consumption) is cyclical: “Water that’s being used in a sink in a Palestinian village then goes back to the land, is used again, goes back to the land, and ends up in an Israeli well – because Israel is downstream, aquifer-wise, from the West Bank. So, every drop of that water that appears as a quantitative share in the Oslo agreement has been used several times by Palestinians and by Israelis. If we only look at the water that has been abstracted, we’re counting the same drop many, many times.”
For Trottier, Oslo II was a failure in other ways too. In a halfhearted gesture towards evenhandedness, the Accord also established the Joint Water Committee (JWC), made up of both Palestinian and Israeli representatives. Israel, however, retained – and retains to this day – veto power over the committee, rendering it functionally inert. The “coordinated management” mandated by the 1995 agreement therefore remains all but impossible. According to a senior Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) official, who supplied written responses to our questions on the condition of anonymity: “Since October 2023, implementing new infrastructure or repairing existing projects has become harder due to poor communication within the Israeli committee, partly because many members serve in the army, which is focused on the ongoing war.”
In a 2007 article for the European Institute of the Mediterranean, Trottier predicted that: “Even if a quantitative division of water [appears] equitable in the present context, demographic growth, in each of Palestine and Israel, and economic development [will] inevitably mean that such a division [will] appear inequitable after a number of years.” On this, she was unequivocally proven right. Israel continues to extract groundwater from the Mountain Aquifer at the agreed 1995 levels, despite a multi-billion investment in desalination technologies that now account for 60-80% of the country’s drinking water. The PWA, meanwhile, is unable to extract even the agreed quantities of drinkable water, and so must purchase water from Mekorot at an inflated rate of NIS 2.863 per cubic meter, “While Israeli water corporations providing water to Israelis on both sides of the Green Line enjoy significantly lower rates [of as low as] NIS 0.361 per cubic meter.” As Palestinian demand for water increases, Mekorot is only too happy to oblige – in 2012, the PA purchased 53.5 million cubic meters (mcm) of water from Mekorot. By 2022, that figure sat at 81.3mcm.
In a damning 2023 report, Israeli NGO B’Tselem found that – as of 2020 – Israelis consumed 247 liters of water per capita on a daily basis, while the same figure for Palestinians in the West Bank was just 82.4 liters (well below the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum of 100 liters per capita per day). Just 36% of West Bank Palestinians have daily access to running water; for a further 47%, supply is intermittent – often limited to just a few days per month. Meanwhile, that same report excoriates, Israelis “would find it inconceivable to live without a constant supply of water in their homes, workplaces, fields, factories or swimming pools every hour of the day, in every season.”
These figures, while alarming, are nothing compared to the more than 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank who remain unconnected to piped water networks, whose water consumption sits at just 26 liters per capita per day – an amount, B’Tselem notes, more commonly seen in disaster zones. These communities are often forced to buy water from private contractors at artificially inflated prices. One mother of three told B’Tselem that she pays NIS 200 (NIS 1 = USD 0.27) to fill a tank of “three or four cubic meters” with water of unknown provenance: “We don’t use the water we buy for drinking or cooking because we do not know where it comes from and it may be contaminated. So we have to buy mineral water, too. Every week, we buy about 21 bottles of 1.5 liters.”
Palestinians are not simply being overcharged – they are, in effect, paying twice for their water. As the PWA official told us: “A significant portion of Palestinian government funds is deducted annually by Israel, around 35 million dollars, under the pretext of sewage treatment costs. So, Palestinians pay for water directly through their bills to Mekorot, and on top of that, the Palestinian Authority faces financial deductions that further reduce its budget, affecting its ability to provide services.”
In the face of this exploitation, some Palestinians are looking to the past for solutions. The village of Battir, 20 kilometers south-west of Jerusalem, was designated a UNESCO heritage site in 2014, its irrigated terraces dating back to a time when this land’s occupiers were Roman rather than Israeli. For the villagers, though, the site is no mere relic – it is the site of a traditional form of water governance centered around the shared management of spring water. Water from the main spring, Ein al-Balad, is distributed equitably using an approach known as al-ma’dood (the ‘counted system’). Gravity then carries that water down a series of canals to irrigate approximately 300 hectares of agricultural land – entirely free of charge and with no external energy inputs.
This model’s continued use represents what Kholoud D. Nasser of Birzeit University calls somoud – translated as “resilience and steadfastness” – which transforms seemingly mundane practices into “weapons in the face of power”. Battir’s self-sufficiency poses a direct challenge to the culture of dependency fostered by Israel’s control of water – and the occupiers are pushing back. The village is flanked by not one but two rapidly expanding settlements – Har Gillo and Beitar Illit – and settlers have diverted and even destroyed many of the canals serving Battir and surrounding Palestinian communities. Villagers are also prohibited from building reservoirs or storage tanks, meaning up to 90% of spring water is lost downstream, where it is pumped across the Green Line – to be used for Israeli agriculture or sold back to Palestinians at a profit. “We have enough water,” one Battir resident told Nasser, “but we lack control.”
In the years since 7 October 2023, the eyes of the Israeli state – and much of the world – have been primarily fixed on Gaza. But while the displacement of the Strip’s residents is a key policy of the Israeli far right – central figures of which enjoy prominent positions in the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – so too is the wholesale annexation of the West Bank. With the IDF concentrating its resources on the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the far right has been only too happy to take on responsibility for the West Bank. In June 2024, the IDF transferred much of its power in the territory to civil servants at the Ministry of Defense, under the direct supervision of pro-settler extremist Bezalel Smotrich.
Even before this formal transfer of power, settlers in the West Bank effectively enjoyed carte blanche to commit acts ranging from vandalism to outright violence against their Palestinian neighbors. In November 2023, the Head of the IDF’s central command, Major General Yehuda Fox, reportedly authored a secret document alleging that the Israeli police were overlooking instances of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. A little over a year later, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel’s West Bank police commander, Avishai Mualem, was “suspected of deliberately ignoring … security service intelligence related to far-right extremists and incidents of Jewish terror, as well as avoiding making arrests … to curry favor with National Security Minister Ben-Gvir to secure a promotion within the police.”
This, though, is nothing new. A review of twenty years’ worth of police investigation files by the Israeli NGO Yesh Din found that “approximately 94% of all investigation files … concerning Israelis’ offenses against Palestinians in the West Bank … ended without an indictment.” It is little wonder then that in 2024, “66% of Palestinian crime victims chose not to exercise their right to file a police complaint against Israelis who harmed them.” This in the context of “a rise in the number of violent settler attacks in the West Bank from an average of two a day in 2022, to four a day in 2024.”
According to ‘Sawsan’, a Palestinian journalist based in the West Bank, settler attacks have not only become commonplace but have begun to take on a familiar shape. “There are always three things they do,” she tells us, “Cutting the water, burning the cars … stealing your way of income, your way of staying alive – which means cows, chickens, goats.” Water infrastructure is therefore a key target for such attacks, says ‘Sawsan’, intended as they are “to obligate [us] to leave this place, because [we] do not have anything left.”
Once again, this trend may have worsened since October 2023 but it has not emerged from nowhere. A month prior to the Hamas attacks, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that 66% of surveyed Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank “reported that access to water had been negatively affected by settler violence”, while “46% reported that settlers had polluted, vandalized or taken over water sources on which Palestinian herders had relied.”
Today, armed with the legal, military and normative backing of the Israeli state, the IDF, and wider Israeli society respectively, settlers’ targeting of Palestinian communities and the resources and infrastructure required to sustain them is more brazen than ever. “It has become very difficult to repair water infrastructure … due to settler attacks,” says ‘Sawsan’, “In villages like al-Taybeh and Mukhmas, access to water resources is repeatedly blocked by settlers who attack whenever efforts are made to reach them.”
Legal ambiguity surrounding the governance of water in the West Bank, and the Israeli state’s lack of intervention – even withdrawal, has empowered settlers to act as de facto enforcers of the occupation, cheered on by influential figures in the Knesset. In May 2025, the Israeli government announced the largest expansion of its illegal settlement program in decades – granting approval for 22 new settlements in the West Bank in a move that Smotrich hailed as a “once-in-a-generation decision” that marks a decisive step towards Israeli “sovereignty” over the occupied territory. Meanwhile, Daniella Weiss, the so-called godmother of the settler movement, is spearheading a movement to settle the first families in the Gaza strip.
As settler outposts continue to multiply, the Israeli state has taken steps to secure their continued access to vital resources. Its 2020 Water Master Plan included an explicit commitment to “double the water supply to settlements”. This luxury is not extended to Palestinian communities – often just meters away – whose springs have dried up, whose wells are fenced off, and whose pipelines and cisterns are routinely destroyed. For them, there is no such consolation
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