President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "World Water Day comes this year at a time when our Palestinian people are being subjected to ongoing genocidal crimes at the hands of the brutal Israeli occupation forces for more than a year and a half, claiming the lives of thousands of children, women, and the elderly, and destroying most of their property, facilities, and infrastructure."

He added, in a speech on the occasion of World Water Day, that the occupation did not stop there, but rather used another weapon to increase the suffering and displacement, and even the slow death of our people, by halting all basic services, especially water, and preventing the arrival of humanitarian aid, all without deterrence or accountability, in flagrant violation of international human rights treaties and international legitimacy resolutions.

The President emphasized that Israel's use of water as a weapon of torture, displacement, and extortion is not new, but rather an extension of a decades-long systematic policy of plundering and controlling all surface and groundwater resources, with the aim of controlling the lives and development of Palestinian citizens, uprooting them from their land, and implementing its political agenda of illegal settlement expansion and undermining the two-state solution.

He stressed the need for the world to realize that there is no more important cause than the cause of Palestinian children in Gaza, who are deprived of a drop of water to quench their thirst. Children line up for hours to get a liter of water, children drink contaminated water, children deprived of food and medicine, children dying of dehydration and thirst, and deprived of living safely like the rest of the world's children.