The occupied West Bank city of Jericho, north of the Dead Sea, is the lowest-elevation city in the world. Temperatures in the oasis town in the Jordan Valley, flanked by the Jordanian highlands to the east and the Judean hills to the west, can exceed 40C (104F) in the summer months, making water a more precious resource than ever.
Until recently, it was unimaginable to hear the smack and rush of waves breaking in the middle of this desert. But last Saturday afternoon dozens of children ran in and out of the swell at a wave pool at Jericho’s Safari AquaPark, laughing at the power of the waves lifting them up.
Some of them had never experienced moving water before: one part of the West Bank is just over nine miles (15km) from the Mediterranean, but security walls, checkpoints and the difficulty of obtaining an Israeli travel permit mean that many of the Palestinian territory’s three million population have never been able to visit the seaside.
Waterparks – a new trend in the Jericho area, where five have opened since 2016 – are a welcome relief from the Middle Eastern summer heat and have become a wildly popular family day out in a territory sorely lacking in recreational outlets.
“We love coming here in the summer – we come probably once a week,” said Nariman Hanna, 31, visiting the rival AquaLand park with her family on a 42C day. “There’s not so many options for fun here. There’s even a pool for women so we can enjoy it however we want too.”
Jericho, where the pace of life is more relaxed than the rest of the region and winter temperatures are balmy, has long been a holiday spot for Palestinians from elsewhere in the West Bank, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the diaspora. It boasts a wealth of historical and religious treasures.
The nearby Ain es-Sultan spring and the rich soil deposited by the Jordan River helped Jericho become the oldest continuously inhabited place in the world, with evidence of settlements dating back 10,000 years.
Today, it is still possible to visit the remains of King Herod’s enormous winter palace and the astonishingly well-preserved mosaics and baths of the Umayyad-era Hisham’s Palace. A 2,000-year-old sycamore tree in the city centre is thought to be the same one in the New Testament that Zacchaeus climbed to catch a glimpse of Jesus.
Investment in large-scale cultural, tourism and infrastructure projects has been difficult, however, because of the longstanding political instability caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the 56-year-old occupation of the West Bank.
A tourism construction boom in the 1990s after the Oslo peace process was short-lived: the Oasis hotel and casino, a glitzy $150m joint Palestinian-Israeli project, was only open for two years before the violence of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, led to the doors closing. Today, the casino still sits empty and shuttered.
“We bought AquaLand in 2017, a year after it opened. Previously it had a consortium of seven owners, which made it really difficult for them to make decisions and get stuff done quickly,” said Vian Saadi, the general manager of the first of Jericho’s waterparks.
“It’s difficult to get the funding to open a business in Palestine and to sustain it. We had a very bad time in the pandemic and now we have several competitors. But sometimes the venue is so busy we have to turn people away.”
Plentiful water in this part of the world is far from guaranteed, and access to water for Palestinians is greatly impaired by the occupation: Israel controls about 80% of the water reserves in the West Bank, but both the West Bank and Gaza Strip face severe water stress and drought.
In the Jordan Valley, about 10% of the land, including the city of Jericho, is under Palestinian governance, known as Area A, but people living there are still cut off from nearby water sources.
The World Health Organization’s recommended water access level is between 50 and 100 litres per capita a day, but a UN study from 2021 found that Palestinians in the parts of the Jordan Valley under total Israeli control can access between just 30 and 50 litres a day, whereas Israeli settlers living in the same area have 320 litres a day. Palestinians in Area A have between 75 and 100 litres a day.
Jericho’s waterpark entrepreneurs have had to get creative. One park is supplied by Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, another by the Palestinian Water Authority, and the Safari AquaPark, which also owns the land, has been able to dig its own wells.
As is standard practice at waterparks and swimming pools across the world, the parks are filled at the beginning of the season and the water is then recaptured and filtered every day.
The waterpark boom is bringing in money and creating jobs elsewhere in Jericho too: on the outskirts of the city, dozens of new villas and holiday homes, with gardens and pools, are under construction. The money, according to locals, mainly comes from Ramallah’s middle class and the Arab 20% of Israel’s nine-million-strong population.
“This is our first time here and we loved it,” said Afrah, a 30-year-old from Nazareth visiting the Safari AquaPark with her husband, Ibrahim, and two young daughters. “There’s nothing like this in Israel. And we feel more at home here.”
Saadi, AquaLand’s general manager, believes that Jericho’s tourism industry has great untapped potential.
“We have the climate and the attractions. We just need to make sure the growth is sustainable and make it easier for foreign tourists to come,” she said.
