Appealing against Policy of not Providing Drinking Water in Unrecognized Villages in the Naqab.
Appeal filed in 11/06 against a ruling delivered by the Haifa District Court (sitting as a Water Tribunal) in 9/06, that upheld prior decisions of the Water Commissioner not to provide water to hundreds of Palestinian Arab Bedouin families living in unrecognized villages in the Naqab. Adalah argued in the appeal that the Water Commissioner’s decisions to deny the basic right to water to hundreds of families were based on improper and arbitrary considerations, primarily the political issue of the “illegal†status of the unrecognized villages. The aim of these decisions is to support the government’s policy of seeking to relocate Arab Bedouin from their land to government-planned towns by refusing to provide them with basic services such as access to clean drinking water. Adalah asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Water Tribunal decision, and to order the provision of water access points via the existing main water distribution network to the affected families. Adalah argued that refusing to provide the families with drinking water of the necessary quality and quantity constitutes a violation of their basic, constitutional right to dignity, which includes the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to health as well as the right to life, and that conditioning these rights on the application of a racist and discriminatory governmental policy is illegal.
C.A. (Civil Appeal) 9535/06, Abdullah Abu Musa’ed, et al. v. The Water Commissioner and the Israel Lands Administration (appeal pending).
