The Palestinian Water Authority has been instructed by the government to allocate 30,000 m² of land in Gaza for a desalination facility with a capacity of 100 million m³/year.
The instructions came from President Mahmoud Abbas, who has formed a higher committee to carry out a regional Arab regional tour to drum up funding for the plant, which could cost US$ 450 million.
The desalination plant and a distribution system was labeled as a humanitarian project in June 2011 by the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), a multilateral partnership created by 43 Euro-Mediterranean heads of state in Paris on 13 July 2008. The facility would help to address a major water deficit for a population of 1.6 million.
The “labeling” of this large-scale project by the representatives of the UfM countries was partly based on a unanimous recommendation from the UfM’s Water Expert Group. The UfM says the project will contribute to job creation and future economic and sustainable development in this highly populated region of the Mediterranean.