Syrian governmental forces and their allies regain control from the Islamic State of the water treatment and pumping plants for the strategic town of al Khafsa on the Euphrates River.
At the end of 2014, work on the Ilisu Dam stops for four months after the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) kidnaps two of the project’s subcontractors. When construction resumes, the largely non-Kurdish workforce is escorted to the site by military tanks. Militants also target Diyarbakir’s Silvan Dam by placing explosives on the roads leading into the site, and security threats in the region cause construction delays.
Palestine News Network reports a water shut off to 17 Palestinian communities in Hebron, West Bank. The report suggests that the shut off was a purposeful act by Israel to force the movement of local Palestinians out of their homes to make room for more Israeli settlements.
A hydroelectric power plant in Kars Province, Turkey is attacked by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Three attackers are killed. The next day, three off-duty Turkish soldiers are killed in retribution.
22 trucks are set on fire at dam sites in Turkey, in attacks attributed to Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants.
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).
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.
The construction and completion of a billion-dollar new middle-class Palestinian city of Rawabi in the West Bank is slowed and delayed for years while the Israeli government withholds access to basic water supplies. The delay is due, in part, to a larger dispute over the actions of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee. In March 2015, the supply of water to Rawabi is finally approved. However, the supply is only sufficient for the 640 families that currently live there; far less…