(7 Apr 2014) Tens of thousands of Palestinians living in east Jerusalem have been without water for more than a month, victims of a decrepit and overwhelmed infrastructure and caught in a legal no-man's land that has left them with few options for fixing their situation.
The residents of the Shuafat refugee camp are technically part of the Jerusalem municipality.
But they live outside the massive West Bank separation barrier that Israel has built, leaving them in an area where Israeli services are sparse and where Palestinian authorities are banned from operating.
The local Israeli water authority says the existing system of pipes cannot handle the rapid population growth of the area and it is scrambling to solve the problem.
Last week, the Israeli Supreme Court gave officials 60 days to find a solution.
But with the scorching summer season quickly approaching, residents are growing increasingly desperate.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed the area in a move that was never internationally recognised. It considers all of east Jerusalem, including Shuafat, to be part of its capital. Some 200,000 Israeli Jews and 300,000 Palestinians now live in east Jerusalem.
Palestinians have long complained that the city has neglected roads, schools and public services in Arab neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem. The situation has worsened for areas like Shuafat since Israel built its separation barrier in the last decade.
The barrier, which Israel says is needed to keep attackers from entering the city, has literally divided some neighbourhoods in half, leaving thousands of people on the outside. Anyone entering or exiting Shuafat, for instance, must now pass through an Israeli military checkpoint.
Arab residents of east Jerusalem, in contrast to Palestinians in the neighbouring West Bank, have Israeli residency rights, giving them the ability to move freely inside Israel and qualifying them for superior Israeli health care and social benefits.
With residents fearful of losing these rights, neighbourhoods on the Israeli side of the barrier have seen real estate values skyrocket in recent years.
As a result, outlying areas like Shuafat have experienced a wave of unregulated construction as people have searched for cheaper housing that is still within municipal boundaries.
Israeli work crews rarely venture into these areas, fearing confrontations with the local population.
The nearby Jewish area of Pisgat Zeev, just a few hundred metres away, suffers no such problems.
"This is a water crisis that was waiting to happen," says Ronit Sela, a spokeswoman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which has led the legal battle on behalf of Shuafat residents.
"We're talking about an area that was cut off from the rest of the city by a wall, where the Israeli authorities don't go in, an area that was neglected even before the wall was set up, no water connection, no infrastructure. And of course the number of people continues to rise," she says.
"Now the whole water system collapses. And when it collapses, no one takes responsibility."
Hagihon, the local water carrier in Jerusalem, says there is little it can do. It says the rapid growth, lack of proper urban planning and rampant use of unauthorised "pirated" pipes has overwhelmed the infrastructure.
Eli Cohen, a deputy director at the company, says the system was built to serve about 15,000 people but believes the population has swelled to between 60,000 and 80,000.
Few homes have water meters, meaning that some 97 percent of the population doesn't pay for its water, he says.
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