How much of the water in Israel comes from desalination
Desalination, the process of removing salt from seawater to make it safe to drink, now supplies 70% to 80% of the drinking and municipal water in Israel, the Water Authority states. That is the direct answer to how much of the water in Israel comes from desalination for most households, though a smaller share, close to 35%, covers every use in the country including farming, a calculation from Water Authority figures for combined output and total need. Israel runs 6 large seawater desalination plants along the coast that together produce about 797 million cubic meters of water a year at full output, the Water Authority states, according to Globes. Set against the roughly 2.3 billion cubic meters the country needs across every use in a year, that output covers closer to 35%, not 70% to 80%, because the larger figure applies only to drinking and municipal water and leaves out the much bigger volume used to water crops.
The desalination figure here uses the more precisely stated combined capacity that source 2 also reports for the same 6 stations. The recycled water and Sea of Galilee figures come from source 1. These 3 figures are the named additions to natural supply for the current year, not a complete accounting of the full national total.
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| Desalination, 6 stations at full output | 797 |
| Recycled and brackish water, mostly for farms | 700 |
| Pumped from the Sea of Galilee | 20 |
A separate 700 million cubic meters of recycled sewage and brackish water, not desalinated seawater, does most of the work of watering farms in Israel, and 20 million more cubic meters comes from pumping the Sea of Galilee, the Water Authority states. Together with desalination, these 3 sources make up what the Water Authority calls manufactured water, water the country produces rather than simply collects from rain and rivers.
What Israel pays for new desalination water, and what the older plants never state
Israel builds these plants through government tenders, not private deals, so the price of new water becomes public the day a tender is won. In 2020, IDE Technologies won the tender for the newest plant, Sorek B, offering to sell water at 1.45 new Israeli shekels a cubic meter, about 0.41 United States dollars by a conversion the company itself states, under a 25 year contract called Build Operate Transfer, meaning the company builds the plant, runs it, and eventually hands it back to the government. Reading the project pages IDE Technologies publishes for its 2 older plants directly shows what that price history is missing. The pages for Ashkelon, opened in 2005, and Hadera, opened in 2009, each claim the plant set a benchmark for low cost water when it opened, but neither page states an actual price. The only real price figure published for the desalination programme in Israel belongs to the newest plant, not to a history running back to 2005.
The figure for Ashkelon comes from source 4, the figure for Hadera from source 5, and the figure for Sorek B from source 3, an average daily figure IDE Technologies states from its own 200,000,000 cubic meter a year figure for that plant.
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| Ashkelon 2005 | 396,000 |
| Hadera 2009 | 525,000 |
| Sorek B 2020 | 570,000 |
What happens when desalination plants fail together
Building a small number of very large plants on one coastline concentrates risk along with supply. In late August 2026, 5 of the 6 largest desalination plants in Israel shut down at once after the Water Authority found unusual cloudiness in the seawater, called turbidity, which it suspects but has not confirmed was linked to algae drifting down from the Nile Delta. Yechezkel Lifshitz, director of the Water Authority, acknowledged the situation was exceptional, Globes reports, with no fixed date given for when all 5 plants would return to service. A country that solved its water shortage by building 6 very large machines on the same stretch of sea has also built a single point of failure for most of the water it drinks.