How Israel Is Destroying Lebanon’s Water Infrastructure | Israel attacks Lebanon News

Beirut, Lebanon – Israel attacks Lebanon’s water infrastructure, using similar tactics to its genocidal war against Gaza, uprooting local populations.

Experts say that Israel’s attacks on vital water infrastructure and near sites being repaired after previous damage have effectively turned access to water into a weapon – and it has become a pattern.

“The impunity that Israel enjoyed in Gaza when it committed water war crimes is on full display again,” Oxfam’s Lebanon country director Bachir Ayoub said in a report published by the charity at the end of March. “The world has shown that Israel can do what it wants, when it wants, without repercussion and again it is civilians who pay the ultimate price for this lack of action.”

Displacement by water

Israel intensified its war against Lebanon for the second time in less than two years on March 2. Hours earlier, Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel, breaking a 15-month period of non-response to Israeli attacks and the more than 10,000 ceasefire violations.

Hezbollah’s attack was also in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei two days later. Over the next few days, Israel would displace more than 1.2 million people in Lebanon in a bombing campaign across the country.

Israel killed journalists, medical workersand devastated southern Lebanon’s medical infrastructure. Experts told Al Jazeera that those acts, along with the destruction of Lebanon’s water infrastructure, were part of a concerted effort to uninhabitable buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

Israel is currently occupying dozens of villages in southern Lebanon and preventing thousands from returning home. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier in April that Israeli forces “remain in Lebanon in a reinforced security buffer zone”.

“This is a security strip 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) deep, which is much stronger, more intense, more continuous and more solid than what we had before,” Netanyahu said. “This is where we are, and we’re not going away.”

One way to prevent Lebanese from returning is to strike Lebanon’s water infrastructure.

“Israel has declared its intention to lift (towns and villages) to the ground and prevent people from going back there,” Rami Zurayk, professor and chairman of the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management at the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, American University of Beirut, told Al Jazeera. “Every drop of water Israel steals is a drop of the water taken from the local population… Israel uses water to displace people, and it displaces people to steal the water.”

Israel damaged six water facilities in southern Lebanon during previous attacks on Lebanon since 2023, and in the first four days of the renewed conflict this year, “damaged at least seven critical water sources, including reservoirs, pipe networks and pumping stations that supplied water to nearly 7,000 people in the Bekaa area alone,” according to Oxfam International. Key infrastructure was damaged in areas such as Britel and Nabi Chit in the Bekaa Valley, and in Marjayoun, in southern Lebanon.

Lebanon’s water infrastructure is being “directly and indirectly and deliberately attacked,” claimed Nadim Farajalla, an environmental engineer and chief sustainability officer at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. “We saw it in 2024 and now in 2026.”

The indirect attacks hit things like the electricity infrastructure, so pumping stations can’t work to move water or sewage. The direct attacks hit the pumping stations as well as municipal workers operating water wells.

The goal behind these attacks is “to force people to leave,” Farajalla said. “Without electricity you can stay in the dark and cook with gas, but without water, how will you live?”

Israel has denied that its attacks are a deliberate attempt to weaponize access to water, instead framing its operations as necessary for national security.

Burden of war on water

Even before the war, the Lebanese state had for decades failed to provide a number of basic services, including the provision of water, to its population.

“The water supply situation in Lebanon must be understood against a background of pre-existing vulnerabilities exacerbated by recent hostilities and the ongoing economic crisis,” Imad Chiri, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) water and habitat coordinator, told Al Jazeera.

South Lebanon, like much of the country’s periphery, has been particularly neglected by the state. In October 2025, the ICRC conducted a water insecurity study in South Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil and Marjayoun districts. Chiri explained that 91 percent of households were found to experience moderate to high water insecurity – insufficient to meet daily needs. For 57 percent of households, the situation was bad enough for them to be classified as highly water insecure.

During times of conflict, water infrastructure comes under even more pressure, especially for areas hosting displaced people. And even basic damage to water infrastructure can lead to worsening problems.

“There are two issues at hand that you need to be aware of,” Farajalla said. “There are attacks on infrastructure, and there is the burden on infrastructure due to displacement.”

“Water sources and networks are often located in frontline or high-risk zones, but they continue to supply populations that chose to stay,” Chiri said. “Identifying contractors willing to work under such conditions is already challenging. Even when they agree, operations require careful planning, limited time on site, and continuous adaptation to a highly volatile security environment.”

Water as a weapon

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) “obliges parties to a conflict to take constant care to conserve water resources and water infrastructure,” Tadesse Kebebew, a legal researcher and project manager at the Geneva Water Hub, wrote for the ICRC in 2025.

Israel ratified the Geneva Convention – the basis for IHL – in 1951. But Zurayk said that “Israel has never paid attention to any of those conventions.”

In Gaza, for example, Israel controls Palestinians’ access to water. Israel also blocked Palestinians’ access to water in the West Bank.

“The use of water as a weapon has also been going on in Lebanon for a long time,” Zurayk said, referring to Lebanon’s accusation that Israel has blocked access to water from the Wazzani River, which crosses the Blue Line separating Lebanese and Israeli territory, including bombing pumping stations.

And the destruction of Lebanon’s already inadequate water infrastructure contributes directly to disease and death.

“It’s not just about destroying access to water, it’s actually causing waterborne disease, the highest cause of infant mortality in developing countries, and causing it in the population,” Zurayk said. “So it’s an indirect biological weapon. It’s a chemical weapon because instead of, what Israel did, extinguishing the region with the harmful chemicals, what you’re doing is removing an essential chemical.”

Yet Israel has never been held accountable.

“The international community has stood by in Gaza and watched Israel’s weaponization of water and its catastrophic consequences for men, women and children there,” Ayoub said in the March Oxfam report. “The same devastation must not be allowed to play out again in Lebanon. Israel must be held accountable for its violations and must not be allowed to occupy more land, deny more civilians their basic rights, and continue to abuse international law without consequence.”