Israel's vast separation barrier slices Nazlet Isa off from one of the richest water sources in the arid northern West Bank where the fight for water is a fight for survival. Israel is believed to monopolise around 75 percent of Palestinian water resources in a region where rainfall is infrequent and water a strategic asset.
In the agriculture-dependent Palestinian territories, hemmed in by Jewish settlements, the lack of resources causes havoc for farmers, while pollution and inadequate waste disposal create manifold sanitation and health problems.
In the northern West Bank town of Nazlet Isa, giant concrete slabs 10 metres (33 feet) high -- lambasted as an apartheid wall by the Palestinians -- have left six homes stranded on the Israeli side along with the rich underground aquifer.
A special system of pipes to access the water was finally built with Israeli permission but immediate access and control has passed into other hands.
"The route of the wall matches that of water resources, the latter being conveniently located on the Israeli side," said Elisabeth Sime, director of aid organisation CARE International, in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
The Palestinians are adamant that the wall -- which they see anyway as a land grab designed to delimit the borders of their promised future state -- was built deliberately to siphon off the aquifer.
Israel says it was built for security reasons to prevent suicide bombers infiltrating Israel or Jewish settlements.
"With the wall, the Israelis clearly sought to commandeer water resources," charges Hind Khury, a former Palestinian cabinet minister responsible for Jerusalem and now the government's representative in Paris.
"Without water, there is no life. Israeli policy has always been to push Palestinians into the desert," he added.
Abdul Rahman Tamimi, director of the non-governmental Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), said the coincidence of the route of the wall with the layout of the region's aquifers was no accident.
"The wall cuts some communities off from their only source of water, prevents tanker trucks from getting around and puts up prices," he said.
In Qalqilya, in the northern West Bank, around 20 wells, or 30 percent of the town's resources, were lost because of the wall, Tamimi says.
While agriculture accounts for nearly a third of Palestinian gross domestic product, only five percent of Palestinian land is irrigated.
On the other hand, 70 percent of Israeli and Jewish settlement land is watered, even if agriculture amounts to barely two percent of Israeli GDP.
"The fact that Israel confiscates and overexploits water affects every sector of Palestinian economic life and causes problems for the chances of development in the region and therefore chances of peace," Tamimi said.
More than 220 communities in the West Bank -- around 320,000 people -- are unconnected to mains water.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are therefore forced to buy water from trucks -- an expense many can ill afford -- to supplement local supplies that often fall woefully short of requirements.
One such consumer is weather-beaten 76-year-old Nazmi Abdul Ghani. Clutching clumps of soil and turning to the heavens, the grandfather of 100 is desperate. "I can't go on like this. My land is parched and I'm ruined."
One of the doyens of the northern West Bank village of Saida, he uses expensive water tankers to irrigate his tomatoes, onions and potatoes.
"The Israelis stole our land and took our water," he rages.
In the small town of Attil, at least a third of the local drinking water is contaminated by sewage and pesticides. Nine-year-old Fatima, her eyes misted with fever, routinely falls sick.
Waste and faeces from neighbouring houses run down the hill and seep through the floors and walls of Fatima's home. They slowly eat away at its foundations and emit a hideous stench.
"I often get stomach ache. I throw up. It's the same for all the children here," she says looking feverishly at her mother Awa.
Doctor Hossam Madi says diarrhoea, gastro-enteritis, fever, kidney failure, infection and dermatological problems blight most Palestinian children and persist into adulthood because of poor water supplies.
"The quality of water is getting worse and worse," said CARE's Sime.
"A high proportion of new-born babies die of water-born infections. In the long run, Israelis will be affected by the pollution of water in the Palestinian territories."
In villages such as Jalbun, household, agricultural and industrial waste from Israeli settlements speed up the process of water pollution.
Tamimi accuses some Israeli businessmen and settlers of dumping toxic waste on Palestinian land in an act of "environmental terrorism".
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