Healing Waters From Hebron to Gaza

Aug 17, 2015 | Kate Rothschild
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For millennia the Holy Land has attracted pilgrims from all corners of the Earth, devoutly following in the footsteps of Abraham and the patriarchs of all three major religions. We too were on a pilgrimage, not a spiritual one but no less sacred. We were to trace the flow of polluted waters down from the Hebron Stream, through the Negev desert, and into the ancient port of Gaza, an environmental mission.

It was a punishingly hot day in July, not the ideal time of year to be peering into an open valley festering with the untreated sewage of 300,000 people. The stench was overwhelming, toxic, the sort of smell you never forget. We were just south of Hebron, in the West Bank, where the stream begins its descent. I use the term 'stream' loosely; this is no babbling brook, an oozing trickle of brown liquid slick with raw sewage and industrial toxins. It splutters past smaller Palestinian towns and villages, metres away from drinking wells and agricultural smallholdings. In summer it completely absorbs into the earth, infecting the water table, a primary drinking water source for Palestinians and Israelis. In winter it floods onwards to join Wadi Gaza where it meets the already fetid Gazan groundwater and arrives, an unceremonious underwater mushroom cloud, at the Mediterranean Sea.