PNN – The Israeli Prime Minister’s claim about “Israel’s expertise in dealing with drought” aimed at provoking the Iranian people in the midst of the country’s seasonal water crisis were met with a tooth-crushing response from a Pakistani writer.
Pakistani writer Muhammad Akmal Khan emphasized in a special note, referring to the recent claim by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aimed at inciting Iranians to take to the streets in response to the seasonal water crisis.
In this note titled “Netanyahu’s Lies; Promises of Water, Shedding Blood,” Mohammad Akmal Khan wrote:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest appearance on the world stage was more of a parable of blood-soaked hypocrisy than a moral narrative. Under the bright lights of a studio, the Israeli prime minister presented himself as the savior of the Iranian people, promising to save “countless lives” from the threat of water scarcity. He interpreted Iran’s water resources statistics as a prophecy, spoke of the risk of displacement of 50 million people, and praised “Israeli solutions” for a country he has declared his enemy. But at the very moment these words were crossing the media waves, just seventy kilometers away, the children of Gaza were dying of thirst with dry lips, because the same government that claims to save foreigners from water shortages had deliberately cut off their water.
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As the words circulated online, children in the Gaza Strip were drinking, at best, salty, bacteria-laden water—and not always. In parts of the besieged strip, there was no safe drinking water in the pipes for months. Pipes that are now broken and buried under rubble once flowed through bombed neighborhoods. Water shortages, combined with famine caused by the siege, have killed at least 315 people in recent months alone, more than half of them children under the age of five, according to reports from the Gaza Health Ministry, UNICEF and UNRWA.
This brutality is not the result of accident or ill-plannedness, but part of official policy. Two days after Netanyahu’s remarks, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “total blockade” of Gaza: “No electricity, no food, no fuel—everything is closed.” Although he didn’t mention water, the practical decisions were clear. The Israeli government shut down the state-owned company Mekorot, which supplies Gaza with about 10 million liters of water per day. The result was an artificial drought in one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
Under international humanitarian law, these actions constitute a clear war crime. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits “attacking, destroying, or rendering inoperable objects essential to the survival of civilians”—a category that clearly includes water infrastructure. The International Committee of the Red Cross also considers depriving people of water to be a war crime if it is used to starve or displace civilians. In April 2024, Human Rights Watch concluded in a report titled “Desperate, Hungry, and besieged” that Israel has turned the deprivation of water and food into a weapon of war, which has led to the spread of epidemics that indiscriminately kill children and the elderly. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has also described the situation as “an imminent death sentence for Gaza’s children.”
But the most devastating statistics are not measured in liters, but in human lives. A UNICEF assessment in March 2025 recorded a 45 percent increase in diarrheal disease among children under five compared to pre-war levels. The Palestinian Ministry of Health has recorded at least 120 infant deaths due to dehydration and diseases caused by contaminated water in the first year of the siege alone.
The story of Maryam, a 6-year-old girl from Khan Yunis who died in January 2025 after drinking contaminated water stored in a rooftop tank – due to the lack of bottled water – is a harrowing account of the lives of children in the area. Her mother told Al Jazeera: She cried all night in pain. In the morning, she was no longer breathing. In Beit Lahia, seventy-year-old Hassan, who had survived four Israeli attacks, died of kidney failure after his dialysis machine broke down due to a lack of sterile water. Doctors at Kamal Adwan Hospital reported that 70 percent of dialysis sessions in northern Gaza had been canceled for a similar reason.