Years of drought

As Israel heads into its fifth consecutive year of drought, the Sea of Galilee stands at a century low, much of the Jordan River is a fetid trickle and the Dead Sea is rapidly shrinking.

The biblical bodies of waters — pilgrimage sites for baptisms and beach parties alike — are crucial to the survival and stability of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. But more and more of the river the ancient Israelites crossed to enter the Holy Land is drying up — the result of climate change, growing populations and the increasing use of its water for agriculture.

The water basin is dotted with sacred sites for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Jesus, who was baptised in the Jordan, is said to have walked on the waters of the Sea of Galilee and multiplied loaves and fishes on its shores. The medieval Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides is buried by the lakeshore, and companions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad are buried on the eastern banks of the Jordan.

For visitors with high expectations for such iconic sites, the scenes can be shocking.

“If you blink when you cross the Allenby Bridge,” which links Jordan and the West Bank, “then you’ll miss seeing the Jordan River,” said Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace, an organisation of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists.

The Jordan River rises as the confluence of several tributaries at the northern end of the Great Rift, a 6000km tear in the Earth’s crust. It flows south into the Sea of Galilee, also known as Lake Kinneret, then squiggles 360km to the lowest place on the planet, the Dead Sea.

The Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main water source, is less than 1 per cent of the size of Lake Ontario and about a quarter of the size of Lake Taupo, and years of drought have further lowered its surface.

Israeli meteorologists predicted in early December that the coming months would be drier than an average winter, prolonging an already troubling drought. As of the last reckoning, the water level in the Sea of Galilee stood at 214m below sea level, about a metre below the point at which ecologists predict damage to the ecosystem and water quality.

“The amount of water that’s flowed into the Kinneret in the past four years is the lowest ever,” said Doron Markel, the Israel Water Authority’s Kinneret director, attributing the drop in volume to meagre rainfall during the normally rainy winter season.

Markel was optimistic, however, that a good year of rain could replenish the lake and help reverse the damage of years of drought. “We still have time,” he said.

The situation in the lower Jordan River is even worse. Around 95 per cent of the river’s historic flow has been diverted for agriculture since the 1960s, including around 55 million cubic metres per year that are given to Jordan as part of a 1994 peace treaty.

Today, the river’s flow is down to just 30 million cubic metres per year, less than a quarter of its historical levels.