How has the cease-fire changed water access in Gaza? And what does it mean when the people in charge of keeping the water flowing are displaced? Host Hanna Rosin talks with Claudine Ebeid, The Atlantic’s executive producer of audio, who reports on her visit with water worker Marwan Bardawil, who is now a Gazan refugee living in Egypt. Read more about Marwan Bardawil’s journey: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/gaza-needs-clean-water/681583/ Listen to our previous Radio Atlantic episode with Marwan: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2023/11/the-man-working-to-keep-the-water-on-in-gaza/675877/ Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
With every day that goes by, the ceasefire in Gaza, if we can even still call it that, seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement and no consensus. For the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day.
About a week ago, Israel once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water. And clean water helps keep them alive. I'm Hannah Rosen, and this is Radio Atlantic. Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil.
He's a water engineer in Gaza, someone who's regularly calculating inflows, outflows, reviewing plans, engineering new ideas to keep the Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war, whatever's going on politically. And something about this bureaucrat trying day after day to keep the water on really captured the growing desperation of the war.
Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7th and continued to get more impossible by the day. When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south.
And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Abade, caught up with him to try and learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people. Claudine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
So, Claudine, there's so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves, the thousands who've had their lives basically upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave?
Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old. He's a father and a grandfather. And he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli airstrikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters, they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza.
And then last summer, like almost 100,000 other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt.
I'm one of them, no house. And when you lost, when your house has become a rubble, you don't just lost your house. You lost your house, your moments. So it's just, it's like you moved having nothing, you lost everything. Just you are here, it's like you saved your body from physical death.
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