Right now, murderous bombs are falling on Gaza and the West Bank in a brutal carnage that has nothing to envy from the barbarity of the Nazis. Israel, with the support of the criminals of the self-proclaimed international community, mercilessly massacres the inhabitants of the occupied areas. Its objective is to physically eliminate the Palestinian people in a planned genocide process that has been going on for 75 years, since its foundation as a state, built on the occupation of Palestinian territory.
Genocide is defined in international law as the deliberate killing of people from a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group, with the intention of destroying the group, either totally or partially. Its main feature is precisely the intention of the crime, not only to inflict damage on a group, but to eliminate it completely.
But there is another type of genocide. That of water, imposed by the State of Israel on Palestine. If it was already terrible that the genocidal government controlled the water supply in the area as it saw fit, now the Israeli army has attacked Palestinian wells and infrastructure, further increasing the water shortage suffered by the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank.
Let us remember that in 1948, the Arab-Israeli war broke out, among other reasons, because Israel did not have water resources in its territory to survive or develop. Two decades later, with the Six-Day War (1967) and the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel began a hydrological policy that has pushed the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the limit.
These days we are seeing how children are already drinking sea water due to the lack of drinking water, the effect for people who consume salt water at levels above safety standards for many years, leads to an accumulation of chemical substances in the body that can cause chronic diseases such as cancer, liver problems, kidney failure and reproductive problems.
The right to defense of the State of Israel has nothing to do with the criminal behavior of condemning a single human being to the torture of thirst; nor can any right to defense be accepted when we are faced with the indiscriminate murder of civilians through incessant bombings.
I want to conclude with the statements of Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, when explaining the serious situation that is being experienced in Gaza in reference to the critical humanitarian crisis caused by Israel: "Gaza is being strangled and it seems that the world has lost its humanity. If we look at the issue of water - we all know that water is life - Gaza is running out of water and Gaza is running out of life."