live and settle in this town. I keep telling my son to move out of here, take his wife and family and go to my parent’s town. When he gets back from work in Israel, he can’t take a shower every day. Sometimes he can only wash his face and hands, that’s it. Sometimes people collect rain water using wells. One of the neighborhoods was using these wells and it got mixed with sewage water because of the bad infrastructure. Now those people have lost one source of water. The residents from the town are leaving because of the water problem. More than half of the people from the town have left because of [lack of] water. Soon the town won’t have anyone living in it. Almost 50 percent of the young men in the town are unemployed. Don’t you think that if we had water those young men would farm the lands and work on them? At least they would have a source of income, better than just sitting around and having nothing to do with their lives. I have a big piece of land. This land could be used for trees and to farm it with anything that I want. It’s 186 dunums (186,000 m²). When we bought the land we thought we would be able to farm it, but we actually couldn’t. Not farming the land is cheaper, isn’t it? I really want to keep this land but I don’t know how I can with all of these problems. It’s exhausting. I feel like I’m trapped: I can’t let go of my land because I have no other alternative income; and at the same time I really can’t farm this land properly because I don’t have enough water. I used to think that if we keep begging for water we will get it but we got tired. We keep asking people to help us and nobody will. What could be worse than this? I have been begging for water for the last 30 years! If I had an alternative income, other than the land, I would’ve left a long time ago; but I can’t leave my land, my trees, my olives and my home.” A. Nofal, Safareen, Tulkarem. Interview: 20 February 2017 “I am an employee at the Palestinian Authority Health Center, and I work as a driver. I have eight children. I had lived my whole life in Safareen [located in Area C] but in 2002 I decided to move to Tulkarem [located in Area A]. Water in Tulkarem is always available in general, so is electricity, and I am not continuously asked to pay for water. In Safareen, I had to pay 180 shekel ($51) every time I needed to buy a water tank. When you have eight kids and a wife, you have to buy a water tank every week, and I wasn’t making a lot of money so this was a big problem. 47