"I could not help but notice the effort not to include Israel," said a member of the Israeli delegation who asked not to be named. He said that cooperation is needed to manage the scarce water resources shared by the two states, and that he would like to see water experts on both sides trained with the aim of harmonizing their understanding of water and sanitation issues.

"At the end we will have to sit down and cooperate, but we will have standards that are totally different," he said. "Our technical engineers won't be able to work with Palestinian engineers, that's what bothers me."

Ismail Al Baz, the program coordinator for Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG), the NGO being presented, denied excluding Israel from his organization's projects.

"We are working with developing countries," said Al Baz, pointing out that Israel does not fall into this category. "In fact, we have worked with the Israelis, we've invited their representatives to our conferences."

Al Baz said that the aim of CGD, which began on the Palestinian project in 1995, is to provide training to local Palestinian engineers and water experts who then implement their own projects on the ground. It uses a non-academic approach involving on-the-job training, consulting, and networking services. Its training programs are held in different cities across Palestine and the Gaza strip in order to make them more accessible to Palestinians who have difficulty moving around because of the security situation in the region.

Palestine faces increasing problems with water and sanitation. According to Al Baz, there is not enough treatment of wastewater, water quality is poor, and there is insufficient water to meet future demands. In fact, the whole region is facing critical water shortages in the near future brought on by drought, global warming, pollution and overuse of resources.

When questioned about what concrete results CGD has provided, Al Baz said, "We offer training, unfortunately we can't offer technical assistance." He said that other organizations, such as German NGO Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), provide infrastructure and logistics on the ground.

Palestinian-born Maruan Issa, who now works on water and waste management programs for German company Fraunhofer, was also struck by the lack of concrete results presented by CDG.

"They trained people for six years, so what is the effect of that? Had the data changed?" asked Issa rhetorically. He also questioned the data that was presented regarding how much water Israelis and Palestinian are using.

One fact, attributed to American water expert Thomas Naff, stated that 83 percent of water resources of the West Bank and the Gaza strip are consumed by Israel every year. The Israeli delegate attending the meeting told Conference News Daily that this figure was completely out of date.

"The data is out of date," said the Israeli delegate. "I think the last book Naff wrote was in 1984. And Naff is not a water expert, he is an expert in conflict."

Naff is, in fact, listed on many web sites as a water expert, as well as a security expert. He did publish a book in 1999 titled, "Data Sharing for International Water Resource Management: Eastern Europe, Russia, and the CIS," but Conference News Daily was unable to establish what year Naff collected his data on Israeli water consumption.

Though concrete results related to water and waste improvement were noticeably missing from the presentation, Al Baz did tell Conference New Daily about improvements in wastewater treatment that he attributes to CGD and GTZ.

"There was not any wastewater treatment in most cities before 1996," he said, adding that now, only 20 percent of wastewater is not being treated.

Though results of water and sanitation improvements were not backed up by tangible data, Al Baz did highlight the results of CDG's training program. According to him, 25 percent of Palestinian water engineers have been trained, with 12-15 percent of these being women.

"The official (Palestinian water) sector has just 2-3 percent women," he said.

CGD is also embarking on new projects in the Middle East. In a program begun last year under the auspices of the European Union (EU), CGD is working to provide policy guidelines for wastewater treatment and reuse in Palestine and the Gaza strip, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. Other projects that are either planned or are already in the pipeline include a regional program for Arab countries and Turkey, programs for South Africa and the francophone countries of West Africa, and training sessions to be held in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey. Regional water conferences are also being planned.

The Israeli delegate summed up his opinion of the project by saying that he was saddened by the lack of cooperation in water resource management. But, he added that in the end, "anything that is good cooperation (between Palestine and Israel) will be killed tomorrow."