On March 4, the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started off his speech at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington with a greeting from Jerusalem, “the eternal and undivided capital of Israel and the Jewish people,” the water was turned off in the homes of tens of thousands of families in the municipal area of the “undivided city.”

The neighborhoods of Ras Khamis, Ras Shehadeh, as-Salam and the Shuafat refugee camp are disconnected from the municipal water supply. (Several families “enjoy” an occasional slight drip from their taps.) These houses in East Jerusalem, on the other side of the separation fence, are home to Israeli residents who hold blue Israeli identity cards. The elderly and disabled people there, who have to wash in pails of water and carry drinking water in bottles, live a 10-minute car ride away from the affluent Jewish neighborhood of Givat HaMivtar.

The water infrastructure in the region, like all other infrastructure, may adequately provide for the consumption needs of 15,000 people, while the local population numbers 60,000 to 80,000. In the absence of urban development plans for these neighborhoods, hundreds of apartments have been built in the area without permits. Consequently, they cannot be legally connected to the water supply and sanitation systems. What’s more, the workers of the Jerusalem area's water and wastewater utility corporation Hagihon are afraid to cross the separation fence because of security concerns.

Those neighborhoods lie on the northeastern side of the fence. A physical, ethnic, social, economic and moral barrier separates them from the rest of Israel — a state that annexed them without asking.