Hezbollah rockets damage a wastewater plant in Israel. Israeli counter-attacks damage water systems throughout southern Lebanon, including tanks, pipes, pumping stations, and facilities along the Litani River.
The Old Testament gives an account of the defeat of Sisera and his “nine hundred chariots of iron’ by the unmounted army of Barak on the fabled Plains of Esdraelon. God sends heavy rainfall in the mountains, and the Kishon River overflows the plain and immobilizes or destroys Sisera’s technologically superior forces (“…the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, and the clouds also dropped water,” Judges 5:4; “…The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon,’…
When King Hezekiah of Judah sees that Sennacherib of Assyria is coming in war, he has springs and a brook outside Jerusalem stopped to keep water from the Assyrians. (“So there was gathered much people together, who stopped all the fountains, and the brook that ran through the midst of the land, saying, Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water” 2 Chronicles 32:1″4).
Historian M. Athar Ali writes that in Mughal India, in the 1260s, the water canals and reservoirs feeding Delhi were intentionally dried up “because the channels feeding it were dammed up by ‘dishonest men,’” referring to local protests over social and political conditions.
At least 18 people are killed and 200 injured after the Indian Army intervenes to reopen the Munak canal, which supplies New Dehli with three-fifths of its freshwater supply. The canal is shut down by economic protests in Harayana state. Sabotage of the canal left more than 10 million people in India’s capital, Delhi, without water.
In August 2012, fighting between two clans in the Lower Juba region of south Somalia kills at least three people and wounds five. Reports from the village of Waraq (near the border with Kenya) indicate that the dispute began over the ownership of new water wells.
Violence in Yemen’s capital Sana’a leads to “acute water and power shortages, forcing residents to rely on power generators and buy water extracted from wells and sold on a thriving black market.” The violence arose during the Yemeni uprising that occurred during the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East. During the violence, government soldiers shelled neighborhoods and destroyed many rooftop water tanks.
Seven children are killed by a bomb thought to be aimed at Afghan police and planted at a fresh water spring in Ghor Province.
Women from the village of Rasooh are reportedly assaulted for attempting to take water from a village well. The tensions over water are related to long-standing tensions between caste groups but have been worsened by drought and water shortage.
A water diversion system in the Colorado Rocky Mountains near Berthoud Pass is vandalized, disrupting water deliveries for several days. The act is suspected to be linked to ongoing tensions over water diversions from the Colorado River basin to Denver and other Front Range communities.