Nearly two months after Shomrim and Ynet exposed the collapse of a sewage treatment plant in the Western Negev and its threat to public health, Israeli authorities have yet to resolve the issue. In the meantime, untreated wastewater continues to flow into nearby streams, posing a serious risk of contaminating groundwater reservoirs in the region.

In mid-February, the Knesset’s Internal Affairs and Environment Committee convened a special meeting to address the crisis. However, the discussion painted a troubling picture of how the state has handled the incident, which began nearly ten months ago. Environmental experts also issued renewed warnings to lawmakers that additional sewage treatment plants are at risk of similar failures.

Ramo Omid, director of the Sderot-Sha’ar Hanegev sewage treatment plant, which collapsed in May last year, explained that excessive waste inflows from factories in Sderot are preventing the facility from returning to normal operations. "In an ideal world," he told the committee, "this crisis would already be behind us. But unfortunately, every additional day we struggle with excess sewage disrupts the entire process of rebuilding the biomass [biological treatment of sewage using bacteria] and pushes us further back. There has been a regression in the restoration process."

By law, factories are required to treat any wastewater they produce before it leaves the facility; only then is it introduced into the sewage system. This is designed to ensure that there is no disruption to the work of the sewage treatment plant. Omid and Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council head Uri Epstein reported that there are factories in Sderot which continue to allow untreated industrial waste to flow into the sewage system – including dangerous heavy metals – and that sewage trucks working for the IDF leak oil from armored fighting vehicles.

These scofflaw factories have benefited from a lack of enforcement until now, since only water authorities are entitled to take any legal action against them and the Sderot Municipality opted not to set up a local water authority and did not pass any municipal bylaws giving it the power to take action. As a result of the Knesset discussion, there was a meeting attended by all the state bodies and ministries involved in this issue and – several months too late – it was decided to find a suitable system of enforcement.

"When these sewage treatment plants overflow or collapse – as happened with the Shikma reservoir – there’s a high probability that the sewage will enter the groundwater and pollute it – or, God forbid, will put it out of commission entirely.”

A strategic water reservoir under threat

The Sderot-Sha’ar Hanegev sewage treatment plant handles tens of thousands of cubic meters of waste a day – both domestic and industrial. After treatment, it provides farmers in the region with purified wastewater. In May 2024, the treatment plant collapsed because of an engineering fault and years of negligent maintenance – over which many people had sounded the alarm. The full extent of the environmental damage caused by the collapse could take years to become apparent. According to expert estimates, more than 500,000 cubic meters of wastewater have flowed from the facility into the Shikma Stream – one of the most vital and sensitive in Israel, since further down the stream is the Shikma Facility, a large water purification plant which provides 6 million cubic meters of drinking water a year.

Because of concerns about the possible contamination of the groundwater and the threat to public health, the Health Ministry ordered the Mekorot Water Authority to stop using water from pumps in that area last month. At the Knesset discussion, representatives from Mekorot, the Israel Water Authority and the Environmental Protection Ministry admitted that they have no updated monitoring of the quality of the groundwater and that they are not able to determine whether it has been contaminated or the extent of the damage to the Shikma Reservoir – which is a strategic national resource.

In addition to potential damage to the groundwater, authorities also found life-threatening vibrio cholerae bacteria in the wastewater, which flowed into the stream; they also found mosquitoes infected with the West Nile virus. “Some days, I wake up in the morning in a panic over how we are going to resolve this crisis as quickly as possible,” says Omid, who was appointed to his position less than three months ago, with the mission of rebuilding the facility. “We are in a race against time; every day that passes we are, unfortunately, polluting the stream.” He adds that, in his estimation, within two weeks it should be possible to complete all the reconstruction work and the facility will return to normal functioning. It is worth noting that Omid said, in response to the original article, that he believed the facility would be up and running within a month. The Israel Water Authority also said in its response that, “according to our professional estimates, the rebuilding process is expected to be stable by the end of January.” Now officials from the sewage treatment plant say that they are optimistic and that the results of samples taken in the past few years are encouraging.

Speaking at the emergency meeting of the Knesset’s Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, Epstein said that, in addition to damage to health and the environment, local farmers are also suffering. Those kibbutzim (a communal settlement in Israel, typically a farm) which, until the collapse of the Sderot-Sha’ar Hanegev sewage treatment plant, received purified water from the facility are now having to purchase water from Dan Regional Association for Environmental Infrastructure (known in Hebrew as the Shafdan) – and are also being slapped with hefty fines for using too much water. “Who will compensate people for the millions of shekels in losses? At the moment, we are being shunted from place to place,” Epstein says. “Who will take responsibility for cleaning the stream? Nobody wants to step up,” he adds.

Ohad Cohen, CEO of Future for the Otef – an organization representing residents of the Gaza envelope – said at the Knesset meeting that, “There is no enforcement, no authority and, most importantly, I understand that I am returning to a contaminated stream that no one is willing to take responsibility for. I am worried about our future. I just have one request: I want to understand who is responsible for cleaning the stream, whether they have the authority and whether they have suitable funding.”

“Who will compensate people for the millions of shekels in losses? At the moment, we are being shunted from place to place,” Epstein says. “Who will take responsibility for cleaning the stream? Nobody wants to step up.”

‘The collapse of Israeli sewage treatment plants’

The overall picture of Israel’s water and sewage infrastructure that emerged from the hearing of the Knesset’s Internal Affairs and Environment Committee is extremely worrying. In a position paper written for members of the committee, Orly Babitsky – the Director of Climate Resilience for environmental watchdog Adam Teva V’Din – warned that many of Israel’s groundwater wells are contaminated and that the rehabilitation work by the Water Authority had been less than satisfactory. “The area of contaminated groundwater in Israel has reached around 83 square kilometers, which is larger than the area of Haifa,” Babitsky wrote. “The volume of contaminated water in the coastal aquifer is believed to be around 1.2 million cubic meters – which is almost equivalent to Israel’s total annual water consumption. The failure to clean up the groundwater means that the pollution is spreading and more and more wells are being forced to stop operations.”

Babitsky adds that the 13 large sewage treatment plants in Israel, which are supposed to handle around 40 percent of the total wastewater, have reached or even exceeded full capacity – which explains the massive increase in the number of malfunctions and the number of times sewage has leaked into the environment. In 2022, there were 1,544 such malfunctions in the sewage system – an increase of 135 percent compared to 2017.

“Given the growth in population,” Babitsky wrote, “the amount of sewage that the sewage treatment plant is expected to handle will also increase significantly. When these sewage treatment plants overflow or collapse – as happened with the Shikma reservoir – there’s a high probability that the sewage will enter the groundwater and pollute it – or, God forbid, will put it out of commission entirely.”

“Israel’s sewage treatment plants are collapsing,” another water and sewage expert – who asked to remain anonymous – told Shomrim in the previous article. “Many of them were not upgraded in time and exceeded their capacities – or are close to that point. The upshot of this is that any fault causes an overflow or the quality of the water supplied to farmers is unacceptably low.” According to this expert, the Water Authority is currently weaker than ever; he cites as evidence the fact that money that was earmarked for rebuilding work on the country’s sewage treatment plants was frozen – under pressure from the energy minister, who was desperate to avoid having to hike up water prices.