The IDF Just Destroyed a Key Rafah Water Facility Rachel Corrie Spent Her Last Month of Life Defending
On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah. The video, in three parts, shows Israeli soldiers planting explosives inside and around the water pumps of a facility in the occupied city. The video—which is captioned in Hebrew, “Destruction of the Tal Sultan water reservoir in honor of Shabbat”—ends with footage of the water facility being blown up. The soundtrack is a song produced by soldiers of the 51st Golani Brigade with lyrics like, “We will burn Gaza… shake all of Gaza… for every house you destroy we will destroy ten.”
A report Corrie wrote just weeks before her murder lays out the work she and other activists with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—“human shield work with the Rafah Municipal Water authority,” she described it—were doing with local Palestinian workers to protect the well and local water system. “The workers are currently building a barrier surrounding the Canada Well…in the Canada-Tel El Sultan area of Rafah,” she wrote. “This well along with the El Iskan Well…was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers on 30th January [2003]. On several occasions the internationals have witnessed shooting from military vehicles on the settler road which passes along the northwestern edge of the sand-dunes and agricultural areas on the outskirts of Rafah.”
