Real Lives
UNICEF finds seven in ten Gaza families miss the six-litre minimum
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The day in Gaza is organised around a number almost nobody outside the Strip has heard: six litres a person, for drinking and cooking, which is what the humanitarian system is trying to deliver and what most families do not receive.
Up to seven in ten families cannot collect even that minimum, UNICEF recorded in June. Aid workers, by the agency's own account, can barely get six litres to everyone who needs it on any given day.
Six litres is not a household's water. It is drinking and cooking only. Washing, laundry, cleaning a wound and flushing a toilet all come out of whatever is left, or do not happen.
Where the water stops#
Gaza's drinking water now comes largely from desalination, and desalination is a machine that eats inputs. It needs fuel, electricity, treatment chemicals and spare parts, and it stops in proportion to whatever is missing.
Seawater desalination produced 20,000 cubic metres a day in March. By UNICEF's later reporting the figure had fallen to 16,000, and the reason given was shortages of chemicals and spare parts rather than any damage to the plants.
That is a fifth of the Strip's manufactured water lost to a missing consignment. Nothing was bombed to produce that drop; something was simply not allowed in, or not funded, or not delivered in time.
UNICEF's blunter measure is the one that describes a childhood: children in Gaza do not have access to 90 percent of the water they used to use.
What the queue costs#
The collection itself is unpaid labour, and it lands on the same people every time. Jerrycans are carried by children and by women in households that have lost the men, and the walk is measured in hours rather than minutes when a tanker's route changes or a distribution point runs dry.
School and water compete for the same morning. A family that sends a child to the queue is choosing between the two, and the third school year opening in tents this month is already competing with everything else the war made compulsory.
Six litres a person for drinking and cooking.
Up to 70 percent of Gaza's families cannot collect it — UNICEF, June 2026
The ceasefire that did not reach the tap#
The October 2025 ceasefire let UNICEF begin the first full assessment of the damage to water and wastewater infrastructure across the Strip — work that was impossible under bombardment and that has to precede any real reconstruction.
Assessment is not repair. Ten months on, the plants that survived are producing less than they did in the spring, the network that once carried their output is largely rubble, and the water that reaches a family reaches it by truck, by queue and by hand.
Every figure here belongs to the agencies that publish them, and each carries a date. What none of them measures is the hour a nine-year-old spends holding a place in line, which is the part of Gaza's water story that never appears in a situation report.
