MINERAL BEACH, West Bank — Standing among collapsed beach huts, fallen palm trees and a shuttered souvenir shop, Haim Levi looks out over the Dead Sea, sparkling and refreshing under the desert sun with the pink mountains of Jordan rising up on the other side.
“But unfortunately, all we can do now is look,” laments Levi, the finance manager of Kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli cooperative community in the West Bank.
The co-op’s now-ruined Mineral Beach resort once annually drew 250,000 local and international visitors to float in the famous salty water and relax with on-site spa treatments while providing half of the kibbutz’s income. That ended in 2015, when sinkholes began eating up the resort’s parking lot, collapsing several buildings and forcing the facility to close permanently — developments that left the kibbutz dependent on its date palm orchards. But some of those have also succumbed to sinkholes, one of the results of the shrinking Dead Sea, which falls about 1.3 meters (about 4 feet) in depth each year.
“Our income is disappearing,” Levi says. “And I don’t think this is something we can fix.”
The drying of the sea, which has lost about one-third of its surface area since 1960, has taken an economic and social toll on the communities along its shores that border Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. Whether they make a living from tourism, farming or the mineral harvesting industry, residents and businesses are increasingly asking how they will survive amid sinkholes, landslides, and the threat of toxic salt storms.
“It’s a disaster for the residents around the sea,” says Dov Litvinoff, mayor of the Tamar Regional Council on the Israeli shore of the Dead Sea. “And no one has done anything about it.”
A proposed international $800 million project to revive the Dead Sea with water pumped from the Red Sea — which has been the greatest source of hope on the horizon — moved closer to fruition in mid-July after a U.S.-brokered water agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But the pipeline is increasingly seen, even by its strongest proponents, to fall short of fixing the problem.
The Dead Sea began shrinking in the 1960s, when population growth and urban development in Syria, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank started requiring more water and depleted the Jordan River, which feeds the Dead Sea, to a trickle. The Jordanian and Israeli chemical industries, which extract salts and other minerals to make products such as fertilizers, also have contributed to the Dead Sea’s decline. Their processes rely on evaporating large amounts of water.
Studies have shown that the receding Dead Sea is now causing about $90 million in damages and lost income a year to the Western shore, which runs through Israel and the West Bank. There are about 5,000 sinkholes along the shore, according to the Israel Geological Society, which have led to the closing of beaches, roads, agricultural fields and businesses. The Israeli government also bans new building on large parts of the shore.
Similar problems exist along the Jordanian shore. Sinkholes have swallowed up farmland in the area of Ghor al Mazraa, threatening the livelihood of this agricultural community of 40,000, says Abed Sultan, program manager for the Jordanian branch of EcoPeace, a joint Israeli- Palestinian-Jordanian nongovernmental organization. Hotels have been forced to invest in new infrastructure, such as retaining walls to protect from landslides and elevators that allow guests to reach the water.
“There is a direct economic impact,” Sultan says. “The Dead Sea, which used to be a stabilizing force in the region, helping cool the air in the summer and retain heat in the winter is no longer this buffer. We have destroyed the habitat and are now suffering from that.”
While Jordanian and Israeli officials lament the problem of the shrinking Dead Sea, they say it also represents an opportunity to work together and foster more trust between the two countries, which signed a peace treaty in 1994.
“The way forward cannot be but a regional approach,” Walid Obeidat, Jordan’s ambassador to Israel, said at a mid-July meeting of Israeli legislators seeking solutions to the shrinking Dead Sea. He called the proposed joint Israeli-Jordanian project, in which water from the Red Sea would be desalinated in Aqaba, Jordan, then the salty brine transported by pipeline about 120 miles to the Dead Sea “a major part of our future.” Hydroelectric power would also be produced due to the altitude difference, and the fresh water created by desalinization would be available to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians.
U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt met with Israeli and Palestinian officials on July 13 to solve a dispute about how much of the fresh water from the project would be allocated to the Palestinians. The dispute had delayed the project, first proposed in the 1990s, says Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s minister of regional affairs. Five multinational companies, including Mitsubishi Corp., Suez and Hutchison Water International Holdings, have recently been approved to compete in the final stages of the bidding process to construct the project.
“This project is on the move now, and I am optimistic,” Hanegbi says. The primary accomplishment of the project will be increased regional cooperation between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority and bringing more fresh drinking water to all parties, he says. The pipeline will merely slow the rate of the Dead Sea drying up, he adds.
“The purpose of the project is not for saving the Dead Sea, that’s just the added value. It’s not a perfect solution.”
Even if the project is implemented in 2021 as planned, the Dead Sea will still fall about 60 centimeters — just under 2 feet — a year, scientists say. Some environmental groups, including EcoPeace, are against the plan, saying the salty brine may imbalance the Dead Sea’s fragile ecosystem. Instead, they advocate better water management in the Sea of Galilee, Jordan River and other areas, requiring an investment of $4.5 billion over the coming three decades, according to a recent European Union-funded study.
Meanwhile, residents remain frustrated.
“There is no future here,” says Levi, of Mitzpe Shalem, whose two children, both in their early 20s, are currently away in college. “I’ve told my kids I don’t want them to come back here. There’s nothing here.”
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Plan to Slow Receding Dead Sea Raises New Worries originally appeared on usnews.com
