IDF Soldiers Film Themselves Blowing Up Gaza Water Facility in Rafah

Rafah | Rafah’s water reservoir blown up

Israeli soldier from the combat engineering corps sharing footage on his personal account blowing Rafah’s water reservoir in Tel Sultan neighborhood “in honor of Shabbat” as he describes it. pic.twitter.com/bpCghkOWeQ

— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) July 26, 2024

The soldier who posted the footage made his account private and deleted his stories which showed him and other soldiers blowing up the water reservoir in Rafah.

Here is a copy of his details pic.twitter.com/hbn6xvlgnp

— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) July 27, 2024

On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video—which is captioned in Hebrew, "Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat"—ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, "We will burn Gaza... shake all of Gaza... for every house you destroy we will destroy ten."

The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area, according to Gordon Murray, one of her fellow activists.

A report Corrie wrote just weeks before her murder lays out the work she and other activists with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—"human shield work with the Rafah Municipal Water authority," she described it—were doing with local Palestinian workers to protect the well and local water system. "The workers are currently building a barrier surrounding the Canada Well...in the Canada-Tel El Sultan area of Rafah," she wrote. "This well along with the El Iskan Well...was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers on 30th January [2003]. On several occasions the internationals have witnessed shooting from military vehicles on the settler road which passes along the northwestern edge of the sand-dunes and agricultural areas on the outskirts of Rafah."

Corrie's report added that the Canada Well had the capacity to produce 35 percent of Rafah's total water supply back then. The defense of the water supply, she noted, led "to ISM activists coming under fire."

The soldiers who blew up the water system this week were carrying out a strategy that has been explicitly articulated by the Netanyahu government. In October, an adviser to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Giora Eiland, laid out the strategy to deprive Palestinians not just of water from outside Gaza, but to disrupt their ability to pump and purify water locally, on the IDF's radio station, GLZ. "Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza," said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. "But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that's good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis."

The interviewer pushed back. "Giora, I want to check that I understand correctly. You are saying—get the residents of Gaza into thirst, into hunger. These are the terms you are using?"

"You understood correctly," he said. "If you want to topple the Hamas regime, you won't achieve that merely through aerial attacks. And a ground invasion, it has its benefits, [but] it also comes with great risks, and it's unclear that the state of Israel needs to take these right now."