The unprecedented shutdown of five of Israel’s six desalination plants on Saturday has exposed what water-policy and national-security experts say is a growing strategic vulnerability: the country’s near-total dependence on large coastal facilities for drinking water.
The plants, all along the southern Mediterranean coast, were forced offline by microalgae swept north by waves from the Nile Delta. Reduced output continued into Wednesday, as the Water Authority and national water company Mekorot scrambled to activate backup supplies.
By Wednesday, two stations in south-central Israel were back online, and the Water Authority was hoping to restart a third later in the day. It also allowed the supply of water to resume for southern farmers after the taps were shut on Sunday. The two southernmost stations, in Ashkelon and Ashdod, remained closed.
Large-scale desalination facilities already supply around 80 percent of Israel’s municipal drinking water, a share set to rise sharply under government plans to expand production in the coming decades.
Experts said the incident showed the need to rebuild backup sources rather than rely almost exclusively on centralized, energy-intensive infrastructure. They called for rehabilitating polluted and inactive wells, restoring natural water buffers, and launching aggressive conservation and pricing campaigns to push water-complacent Israelis to save.
