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The recent air strikes by Israel on the Gaza Strip have crippled the water distribution system. Dinesh Suna, coordinator of the Ecumenical Water Network of the WCC, shares that an already challenging water situation in Gaza has recently worsened because of the violence, threatening the fundamental human right to water and sanitation.

“The Palestinian people thirst for water justice.” So claims a recently issued statement by a fact-finding group that this month visited Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza to better understand the critical issues of water and sanitation in Palestine.

Celebrating water as God’s creation and reflecting on challenges faced by people having inadequate access to this life-giving resource, members of churches in Onex, Switzerland, gathered together in Geneva. Their meeting was held beside a pond called Étang des Mouilles on the rainy Sunday morning of 15 September.

A statement issued at the WCC consultation calls on churches, governments and the United Nations to ensure universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene, while placing access to water prominently on their post-2015 agendas.

In a talk during the German Protestant Kirchentag in Hamburg, the WCC general secretary stressed the leading role of churches worldwide in the process of establishing justice and an ecologically-friendly way of life.

At the recent World Social Forum, ecumenical voices warned about the grave consequences of extraction of natural resources and mining, which they say generate a tremendous amount of social and ecological debt.

The German Protestant aid agency Brot für die Welt has handed a steering wheel, symbol of its water campaign, over to the WCC, thus symbolically handing responsibility for this concern and a newly formed Ecumenical Water Network.