UNICEF reports tripled attacks on water systems in conflict zones

Attacks that damaged or destroyed water and sanitation systems in conflict zones more than tripled between 2021 and 2025, UNICEF said in a report published on Thursday, with children carrying the health consequences.

The report, Water Under Fire 4, counted fewer than 45 incidents across eight countries in 2021 and more than 135 across 15 countries in 2025. It documents assaults on water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, and on the workers and communities who depend on them, in 23 countries and territories over a period it gives as January 2021 to June 2026.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said attacks on these systems "deprive children of safe drinking water and the essential services that rely on water to function effectively".

The agency grouped the assaults into seven categories, among them strikes on treatment plants, pipelines and wells, contamination of water sources, and restrictions on the supply of spare parts and chemicals needed for treatment.

The effects run past drinking water. UNICEF said hospitals without clean supply cannot sterilise equipment, deliver babies safely or prepare therapeutic milk for children with severe malnutrition. The report recorded children killed or injured while waiting in line for water, citing examples from Gaza, and described risks to women and girls, who usually fetch water for their households, including sexual violence.

Its country examples include Khartoum state, where by March 2024 only one of 13 water treatment plants was fully operational, and Gaza, where more than 130,000 metres of sewage pipelines have been destroyed since October 2023. In Iraq, a drone attack on a gas field in November 2025 cut electricity production in the Kurdistan region by about 80 per cent, forcing authorities to ration power between water projects, hospitals and cities, according to the report. The UN recorded the killing of 14 water facility employees in Lebanon during the 2024 conflict.

Supply can fail even where pipes and pumps survive, the report found. UN News reported that UNICEF's Louise Potterton in Ukraine described attacks this week that disrupted water supply in Kyiv.

Funding is the second pressure. Among countries with a coordinated humanitarian response in the water and sanitation sector, 137.9 million people need assistance and only 26 per cent of the money required this year has been received, UNICEF said.

"Humanitarian workers do their best to keep water flowing despite increasing attacks," Russell said. "However, repairs cannot substitute for the protection of these facilities that is required under international humanitarian law."

UNICEF asked warring parties, member states and donors to treat water and sanitation systems as essential to civilian survival, to set up a mechanism for systematically collecting data on attacks against them, to protect communities and workers seeking access, to let humanitarian, water and energy workers reach people and supplies safely, and to invest in systems that keep running through conflict.