The unprecedented shutdown of five of Israel’s six desalination plants on Saturday has exposed what water-policy and national-security experts say is a growing strategic vulnerability: the country’s near-total dependence on large coastal facilities for drinking water.

The plants, all along the southern Mediterranean coast, were forced offline by microalgae swept north by waves from the Nile Delta. Reduced output continued into Wednesday, as the Water Authority and national water company Mekorot scrambled to activate backup supplies.

By Wednesday, two stations in south-central Israel were back online, and the Water Authority was hoping to restart a third later in the day. It also allowed the supply of water to resume for southern farmers after the taps were shut on Sunday. The two southernmost stations, in Ashkelon and Ashdod, remained closed.

Large-scale desalination facilities already supply around 80 percent of Israel’s municipal drinking water, a share set to rise sharply under government plans to expand production in the coming decades.

Experts said the incident showed the need to rebuild backup sources rather than rely almost exclusively on centralized, energy-intensive infrastructure. They called for rehabilitating polluted and inactive wells, restoring natural water buffers, and launching aggressive conservation and pricing campaigns to push water-complacent Israelis to save.

“Desalination is supposed to complement, not replace, natural sources,” said Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Dror Avisar.

Israel, an arid country with a fast-growing population and declining rainfall, has long felt secure in its ability to meet water needs through technology, from drip irrigation and wastewater recycling to desalination — all fields in which the country leads globally. But this week’s mass shutdown appeared to underline warnings that the same technological success has encouraged overdependence on a narrow set of vulnerable systems.

The risk was not entirely unforeseen. According to the state comptroller, between 2007 and late 2023, 14 seawater pollution incidents — including microbial contamination, fuel and oil leaks, and storm-induced turbidity — forced individual plant shutdowns lasting from a few hours to five days.

The supply of desalinated water is set to increase in the short term as part of a government target to reach 1.1 billion cubic meters per year, with new facilities near Acre in the Western Galilee and in central Israel’s Emek Hefer.

Looking ahead, the government in June approved a Water Authority plan to produce an annual 2.3 billion cubic meters of desalinated water by 2050, and 2.75 billion by 2075.

“Decades of reliance on desalination have led to a false confidence,” warned Clive Lipchin, a water expert at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in southern Israel. “This is a wake-up call to the government and the public that these are amazing technologies, but we haven’t solved the water scarcity problem.”

David Katz, an associate professor at northern Israel’s University of Haifa who researches water policy and economics, agrees.

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