The Water Authority, in coordination with the Yarkon River Authority, plans to completely end the streaming of purified wastewater into the river within five years, and increase the volume of clean water streamed into it.

The move comes more than 60 years after the river’s natural flow was cut off. The highlights of the plan were presented earlier this month at the 51st annual Israeli ecology and environmental sciences conference.

In recent decades, the Yarkon River, which flows through the Tel Aviv metropolitan area and into the Mediterranean Sea, has come to symbolize the problem of waterway pollution in Israel. A little over 60 years ago, a water supply system was built for the Negev region by diverting the spring waters that flowed into the Yarkon.

This left only the wastewater of surrounding cities to flow into the river, making it a source of pollution. When the Maccabiah Bridge in Tel Aviv collapsed in 1997, four athletes died after falling into the river. Three of them died of infection.

In the past two decades, the flow of a tiny volume of spring water has been renewed into the eastern segment of the river. Concurrently, nearby cities – including Hod Hasharon and Ramat Hasharon – built new purification plants, significantly increasing the quality of the treated wastewater flowing into the river.

But according to Yonatan Raz, the river authority’s ecologist, the river cannot be brought to the desired ecological state as long as treated wastewater containing certain pollutants, including medications, still flows into it – no matter how well the wastewater has been treated.

One of the biggest problems created by the treated wastewater is that it damages the river water’s oxygen concentration, which in some cases has dropped to such dangerous levels as to preclude the existence of life. “The recommendation of all experts is that a river needs natural water, and the streaming in of treated wastewater must stop,” Raz noted at the conference.

A decade ago, the Water Authority offered to increase the streaming of potable water and to remove the treated wastewater, but the Yarkon River Authority refused. “We feared that in drought years, they wouldn’t be able to supply the potable water, and then the river would run dry,” said Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, who also serves as chairman of the Yarkon River Authority.

But over the past year, the push to stop the streaming in of treated wastewater has reignited, with the river authority driving the change. “One of the factors that changed our position is the increase in the scope of seawater desalination,” Huldai explained. “This has led to a situation where there is no water problem in Israel, not even in drought years.”