Israel hails pipeline plan to save Dead Sea

The Dead Sea. Photo / Wikimedia Commons

Israel hailed a historic agreement yesterday that it claimed would save the sinking Dead Sea by linking it with the Red Sea through a 180km underground pipeline.

The Red-Dead Conduit deal was due to be signed by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority at the World Bank headquarters in Washington after years of deliberation and feasibility studies.

The project is expected to see 200 million cubic metres of water a year pumped northwards from a desalination plant to be built at the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan, near the mouth to the Red Sea.

Some will be distributed to Israel, Jordan and the occupied West Bank while four pipes will pump the rest to the Dead Sea.

Water levels in the Dead Sea, whose banks are in Israel and Jordan, have dropped by more than 25m in the past 50 years - with experts forecasting that it could be dried up by 2050.

Silvan Shalom, the Israeli Energy and Regional Development Minister, said the deal was a result of "strategic co-operation of diplomatic significance" between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

"This is a breakthrough after many years of efforts. It is nothing less than a historic move," he told Israel Radio.

But environmentalists criticised the agreement, with Friends of the Earth accusing Shalom of misleading the Israeli public by packaging it as an initiative to save the Dead Sea.

"What is being devised here is nothing to do with the Red-Dead Canal project but is a water exchange programme," said Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East.

"It will bring foreign water into the Dead Sea that would upset its ecosystem, creating gypsum and quite probably algae."