The targeting of Palestinian water infrastructure is a major feature of Israel’s periodic assaults on the West Bank and Gaza. From Operation Defensive Shield (2002), through Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Cast Lead (2008–9), Operation Pillar of Defence (2012), to Operation Protective Edge (2014), devastation to water infrastructure prolongs the impact of attacks on civilian populations and in Gaza is barely repaired before the next bombardment begins. The lack of clean water, combined with cramped living conditions for refugees sheltering in public buildings, heightens the risk of infectious disease in the immediate aftermath of warfare and has disastrous long-term effects on health and environment. Infrastructural destruction is similarly devastating to the Palestinian economy. The existence of this practice allows us to add a qualifier to discourse on ‘water wars’. As Mark Zeitoun writes, ‘[w]hile water may rarely be the sole motive for war it is often a victim and target of it’. As this chapter's epigraph, written in the wake of the 2014 Gaza War, indicates, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza experience water as a ‘victim and target’ of war in different ways with the same outcome of acute manufactured crisis. The Israeli authorities’ obstruction of new infrastructure in the West Bank, systematic neglect of water infrastructure in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, threats to disconnect Palestinian communities in Israel and refusal to provide water infrastructure and other services to ‘unrecognised’ Bedouin villages can be seen as further aspects of this ‘water war’.

In this chapter I turn to Israeli Palestinian author Sayed Kashua's 2004 novel Let It Be Morning (Vayehi Boker) to bring to light the crucial connections between water infrastructure and citizenship that make its disconnection and destruction so potent as a form of warfare. I begin by outlining the longer history of Israeli infrastructural warfare within what Stephen Graham calls the ‘new military urbanism’ and examining the material and representational challenges involved in producing infrastructural hydrofictions.