Israel’s “deliberate” curtailing of Gaza’s access to water amounts to “acts of genocide”, Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), tells Al Jazeera.

In a December report, HRW found that Israeli authorities had deprived people in the besieged Strip from accessing water through a variety of means, Jafarnia said.

“Not only [by] attacking desalination facilities but also by cutting off water through the pipelines that go into Gaza from Israel, by cutting off fuel or restricting access to fuel, and by also destroying and attacking wastewater facility plants,” the researcher told Al Jazeera, speaking from Beirut, Lebanon.

“It’s also a matter of not allowing any repair materials that are required in order to actually reconstruct and repair a lot of the water infrastructure and attacking a warehouse that belonged to the water municipality which stored … millions of dollars of repair equipment.”

These different actions, Jafarnia added, “amounted to acts of genocide in that Israeli authorities were deliberately depriving people of access to water, which is ultimately deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the population of Gaza, which is … one of the acts contained within the Genocide Convention”.