Speaking to the Tagesspiegel in 2019, Irina Engelhardt, lead researcher of the international MedWater research project and professor at Technical University Berlin, espoused a utopian vision for the future of resource management in the Middle East: Wasser kennt keine Grenzen (water knows no borders). Engelhardt coordinated the project between 2017 and 2021, which resulted in the development of a software tool mapping water reserves of the Western Mountain Aquifer (WMA), whose recharge zone (the geographic area beneath which the aquifer is replenished through rainwater and surface water) is mainly located under the West Bank. Financed by €1.8 million of German public money from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, today BMFTR), MedWater was touted as a model of Israeli-Palestinian scientific cooperation. Its organisers even claimed that it advanced UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: to “ensure availability and sustainable management of clean water and sanitation for all by 2030”.
At first, MedWater looked the part. The funding call of the German ministry’s Global Resource Water (GRoW) programme, a major initiative of the BMBF devoted to international water management research, required that the institutions on the ground relevant to a project—those who would ultimately benefit from the resulting tools and resources—be integrated into research projects as contributors. The same call suggested that transboundary water conflicts constituted exactly the kind of problem GRoW research projects were intended to help solve. MedWater would ultimately produce a Decision Support System (DSS), a tool which models the impact of adding and removing water wells on the resources of the WMA located beneath Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Throughout the project’s first year, it was presented as a trilateral project on a shared resource that would deliver a tool to both sides. At MedWater’s opening conference in Karlsruhe in September 2017, Engelhardt showed a slide of MedWater’s “global partners”. Included were logos of several Palestinian agencies—the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) and the Hydro Engineering Consultancy (HEC)—featured prominently alongside Israeli and European counterparts. By the time MedWater was completed in 2021, no Palestinian shareholder would remain involved.
“Both sides” was never plausible and the consortium knew
The WMA is the largest groundwater reservoir shared by Israel and the occupied West Bank. Around 73 percent of its recharge zone is located on the Palestinian side. In proposing that its research would benefit both Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, MedWater’s researchers were claiming that the tool would serve an occupied people just as readily as their occupiers.
Scientific researchers often position themselves as neutral observers concerned with objective facts. Yet as experts attuned to the realities of resource management in the West Bank have readily noted, claims of objectivity don’t square with how water usage under occupation actually functions. In 2017, the Palestinian scholar Muna Dajani argued that Palestine’s water crisis is “a social and political construct that obscures how Israel entrenches its hegemony over water resources”, and that foreign researchers can deepen these problems by treating water scarcity in Palestine as an issue that simply requires technologically-driven solutions. Such solutions, Dajani writes, “disregard the social, political, and cultural elements of water”, and help sustain a business-as-usual approach that normalises the occupation.
The MedWater consortium was aware of these risks. One of the partners was Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), which co-published a UN inventory in 2013 recording that Palestinians “have not been authorised to drill a single well in the Western Aquifer since 1967”—the very aquifer MedWater set out to model. Another partner was Merokot, Israel’s state water authority. In a United Nations Secretary-General report of 2014, Merokot was shown to have repeatedly shut off water valves supplying Palestinian villages with water during the summer months, so as not to affect the water supply to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, naming the Ariel settlement explicitly. Within a few years of its initiation, MedWater included both Ariel—the largest Israeli university located in the occupied territories—and Merokot as partners in a project that, in its own words, was supposed to advance water access for all. In short, a tool allegedly conceived to enable water use “without borders” was partnering with two major contributors to water apartheid in the West Bank.
This raises a question the BMBF never seemed to have asked: How did this project come to be at all? MedWater’s developers knew—especially since their own partner had documented it—that all Palestinians’ permit applications to drill wells on this aquifer have been denied since 1967. The research consortium could not have failed to know that Mekorot and Ariel were named actors in the water apartheid regime the UN itself was recording. On these facts alone, a project built with these partners, on this resource, was bound to reinforce Israeli control of Palestinian access to water.
Then, one by one, the Palestinian partners were quietly removed from the project’s documentation. In June 2018, MedWater’s scope was expanded at a meeting in Jerusalem attended by Israel’s Hydrological Service, VisDat, TU Berlin and the University of Göttingen. No Palestinian representation was present. During that meeting, the software had been expanded to include a new feature capable of modelling the impact of adding or removing water wells. Then, in an interim report submitted to the ministry by TU Berlin in that same year, researchers stated that the subcontract with PHG was no longer needed. In the report of 2020, the consortium told the ministry that the subcontract with PWA and HEC would not be carried out. The final report then restated that subcontracts with PWA, HEC and PHG—every Palestinian institution named in the kick-off conference—were not realised and added that the results were transferred “as planned” to recipients including Mekorot.
Despite initially being named as partners, no Palestinian institution was demonstrably involved in the project, nor was named as recipient of its results—a direct breach of the funding call’s own condition, and without a single question from the ministry that set it.
Palestinian exclusion is not the only story
The MedWater project to ensure “water access for all”, working only with an occupying force while stating “water knows no border” could constitute a funding scandal on its own—but more urgently, it is a question of German research’s direct contribution to water apartheid. MedWater’s DSS does not merely characterise underground water resources, but also models the impact of adding or removing wells and the drawdown (the drop in the water level) they produce. And the tool’s concept document states that it “can be used directly by the Israeli partners or easily transferred to an Israeli web server”. Taken together, these factors indicate that MedWater is optimised for use by agencies already complicit in water apartheid, and includes the capacity to explicitly model the destruction of Palestinian wells or the illegal addition of Israeli water wells on Palestinian territories.
German universities, using German public funds, built a tool that models the impact of adding or removing water wells. They then gave it to the state that is known for destroying Palestinian wells, while simultaneously refusing them the permits to build new ones.
At the project’s final conference in Berlin in October 2020, the system was demonstrated creating new wells in the Hebron Governorate, inside the occupied West Bank. In the demonstration, a prospective well was modeled in action, including setting pumping rates and calculating the resulting water drawdown—in the same aquifer where, as the consortium’s own partner BGR had recorded, no Palestinian has been permitted to drill since 1967. The consortium knew full well that the only party capable of implementing what was being demonstrated was the occupying power—and yet publicly showed MedWater being used in occupied territory. This was, quite simply, a public live simulation of breaking international law—for the whole world to see, brought to you by German taxpayer money.
Germany at the Hague
On 8 September 2026, our research report detailing the MedWater project was cited at the International Court of Justice. Arguing its case against Germany in Nicaragua v. Germany, lawyers representing Nicaragua told the court that the conduct it was submitting for judgement included “the involvement and participation of German companies, enterprises and institutions in activities contributing to the deprivation of natural resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”. (paragraph 30) Our research into MedWater was cited as an example in its footnote 187. On that same day, the BMFTR finally responded to our latest Freedom of Information request for the project’s internal documents. The documents we received were almost entirely redacted—and the ministry then told us it would be sending us the bill for the work.
There can be no doubt what kind of harm a tool like TU Berlin’s MedWater DSS can do to the Palestinian people. In August 2025, in Adh-Dhahiriya, the very same area where the MedWater was demonstrated in use during the Berlin final conference, Israeli authorities sealed seven Palestinian artesian wells with concrete. The tool tells them precisely what kind of impact such a move would have on the aquifer under occupation.
But this is not the story of a single water project. The instrument Germany relies on to keep public money out of the occupation—a “Territorial Clause” implemented in 2014—restricts German collaboration and public funding to institutions headquartered in Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Such a restriction has no oversight of what Israeli funding partners actually do, or where German money can be used. Asked about the subcontract to Mekorot, the BMFB replied that the company’s registration in Tel Aviv meant that there was no violation of the Territorial Clause. Yet in July 2024, the International Court of Justice held that every state must distinguish, in its dealings with Israel, between Israeli territory and the territory occupied since 1967, and must not aid or assist in maintaining the occupation—an obligation Germany says it accepts. A safeguard that checks a singular postal address without checking the activities of the institutions and companies it funds cannot meet that duty, and Germany has shown no intention of replacing it.
This is exactly why we call for the academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in the occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people. There is no neutral research to be done with a regime that disregards human rights and international law.
This article draws on “German Public Research Money and the Occupation of Water in Palestine”, a collaborative investigation by Not In Our Name TU Berlin, Academic opposition and Academic Boycott Campaign Germany. The investigation documents two findings: first, that Germany has no working safeguard against public research money supporting the occupation—the “Territorial Clause” it relies on asks only where an institution is headquartered, not what it does or where its results are used; and second, that the MedWater project delivered a tool that can further entrench Israel’s water apartheid regime enforced in the West Bank. The full report, with all sources and the ministry’s own responses, is available at notinourname-tu.org/water-apartheid.
