The activities will begin on March 22, World Water Day and will end on March 30, Land Day in Palestine.

In this way, together with movements that support the Palestinian people around the world, they are relaunching a campaign against Mekorot that started several years ago. This initiative aims to strengthen the campaign.

In an interview with Real World Radio, international coordinator of the Palestinian and global campaign “Stop the Wall”, Maren Mantovani, said that Mekorot is “fundamentally responsible for stealing water from the Palestinian people”, which is distributed to Israeli citizens and the settlers who live in Palestinian territory.

“This plays a key role in the expulsion of Palestinian communities from their land “, added Mantovani, because many villages don´t have access to water. For this reason many Palestinians are forced to leave their lands and join the over six million Palestinian refugees in several parts of the world, she explained.

The Italian leader, who lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil, said that the average Israeli citizen uses 300 liters of water daily, while a large part of the Palestinian population doesn´t have access to water, or its access is extremely limited, way below what the World Health Organization (WHO) considers necessary for a dignified life.

Mantovani also said that Mekorot is expanding to the South in the framework of a global water privatization trend and gave details about the many actions against the company in some countries, in line with the restrictions imposed on Israel by the European Union (EU).

In December, the Dutch water company Vitens ended their commercial relationship with Mekorot “due to its contribution to illegal settlements”, said Mantovani, and added that Vitens highlighted that any cooperation with Mekorot necessarily contributes to the maintenance and strengthening of the illegal settlement project. By the end of last year, a million-dollar contract in favor of Mekorot for the installation of a water purification plant in La Plata, near the capital city of Argentina, Buenos Aires, was suspended.

Early this year, the EU passed some resolutions that ban any investment from EU countries to companies working on Israeli settlements. The Dutch Pension Fund withdrew investments from five large Israeli banks because of their investments in the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territory) and the Norwegian Investment Fund suspended its economic support to construction companies working in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, to name a few.

*If you are interested in joining the campaign against Mekorot, please send an email to [email protected]