Hussein Mohammed Ali Tayat, 52, sighs heavily while sipping thick, black coffee. 'I lost a large portion of my banana crop - millions of shekels - to drought last year. I have 17 family members to support. The situation gets worse each summer.'
Mr Tayat lives in the small Palestinian farming village of Auja east of Jericho, about 5km from the Jordanian border. The 4,500 residents subsist on earnings from tomato and banana crops, but diminishing water supplies have created a crisis in the village.
During the dry summer stretches from June to early October drinkable water bought from Israel is rationed to one to two days' allowance for each household per week. And the aquifer used to irrigate crops runs dry each summer so cash crops are slowly dying out in villages such as Auja.
And the problem is getting worse: earlier this year the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted rising global temperatures would cause critical water shortages in Africa, the Middle East, China, Australia, parts of Europe and the US by the end of the century.
Water shortages have also sparked international security fears - last month the UN Security Council held a meeting on the implications of climate change on global stability.
The US-based Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database has warned that half the world has no access to clean water, causing 2.5 million to five million deaths annually. 'The magnitude of potential destruction is staggering,' said its director Aaron Wolf. 'The water crisis is a weapon of mass destruction that does more damage than all wars put together - more damage than tsunamis, earth- quakes and almost anything you can imagine.'