The Palestinians and Israelis have long been embroiled in a dispute over the scarce water resources in the West Bank and its surroundings. Now a leading local rights group has said that both sides are responsible for putting the entire region's water source at risk.

In a report published on Sunday entitled Foul Play: Neglect of Wastewater Treatment in the West Bank, the Israeli organization B'Tselem warned that the failure to treat wastewater in Jerusalem and the West Bank could lead to the pollution of the mountain aquifer.

Other groups have also forecast that a lack of cooperation and failure to act by both Israelis and Palestinians could well lead to an effective poisoning of one of the major sources of water between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, the area that comprises Israel and the Palestinian territories.

B'Tselem said that the blame mainly lies with Israel, but stressed the Palestinians are also at fault. "This is not about security," said the organization's spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli. If the two sides fail to take protective measures, the results will be "catastrophic," she said.

The report claims that the wastewater produced by two million people out of the 2.8 million living in Jerusalem and the West Bank is simply not treated.

"Since the beginning of the settlement enterprise, Israel has not constructed advanced regional wastewater treatment plants in the West Bank settlements as it has done inside Israel," said the report.

Yet while pointing out that Israel did not take the issue seriously till 2003, another environmentalist group named Friends of the Earth Middle East told Xinhua that the Jewish state has since then made considerable strides to improve the situation. "It realized it was shooting itself in the foot," said its Israeli director Gidon Bromberg.

Even though the organization said Israel's recent actions have been somewhat praiseworthy, the Israel Water Authority rejects the idea that it did little since the creation of the Palestinian National Authority in 1993 until the middle of this decade.

On the government body's website, there is a lengthy report relating to what it says are all of the steps it has taken in line with agreements with the Palestinians to improve water quality and access in the West Bank.

B'Tselem accused many Israeli settlements, which are usually in higher locations than Palestinian towns and villages, of not treating their sewage and said the polluted water then affects the Palestinians below. However, the Israeli online report counters that Sewage discharged from Palestinian communities in the West Bank flows by gravity towards Israel, principally to the west but also to the south.

Israel was lambasted earlier this year by the World Bank for the way it dealt with water supplies in the Palestinian areas. The bank's document suggested that there is an unfair distribution of water, with Israelis receiving a disproportionately large amount.

The Palestinian Water Authority said that Israel has obligations as an occupying force and is in breach of international law.

But the Palestinians have their own in-house critics. Rayek Hamad is the chief engineer in the Palestinian city of Tulkarem, which has been cooperating with the neighboring Israeli council of Emek Hefer to clean up their wastewater. It is a rare example of successful cooperation in this field, and Hamad insists this type of collaboration must spread if calamity is to be avoided.

"We should realize that solving such issues is of common benefit to both sides; if there's no cooperation there'll be a disastrous effect of the groundwater resources. Water quality will worsen and people will end up using contaminated water," said Hamad.

If this issue is not resolved quickly, more efforts will have to be taken on desalinating sea water from the Mediterranean Sea, a very costly process that may be financially out of reach for Palestinians.

It is the financial element that Friends of the Earth Middle East believed is the main reason the Palestinians are not constructing water-treatment plants. The donor nations, who often help the Palestinians with large-scale infrastructure projects, feared that any sewerage facilities they were to fund would become "white elephants," said Bromberg.

"They fear Palestinian residents would not be able to pay for the maintenance of these sewerage-treatment plants," he said. Theydo not want to hand over tens of millions of dollars or euros for the plants to be hardly producing any treated waste water after a handful of years, he added.

B'Tselem's key recommendations are that Israel treats all settlement wastewater in accordance with the treatment standards applying in Israel; that the authorities enforce the law on polluting settlements; and that the Israeli government and the Palestinian National Authority cooperate in advancing Palestinian wastewater treatment projects, even if this necessitates facilities that will treat both Palestinian and settlement wastewater.

This last point shows how seriously B'Tselem and others take the water issue. The settlements are an anathema to everything that B'Tselem stands for. All settlements should be removed from the West Bank so that a Palestinian state can be established in the entire area, including eastern Jerusalem. Yet the water issues, which B'Tselem sees as being beyond the realm of politics is paramount.

"Aside from the immediate danger and risk to health and crops, there's also a very dangerous expected impact on the mountain aquifer, which experts predict will become polluted and that won't affect both Palestinians and settlers but on all of us," said B'Tselem's Michaeli referring to all some 10 million Israelis and Palestinians living between Jordan and the Mediterranean.

(Xinhua News Agency June 29, 2009)