In Gaza, the health crisis threatens

Photo: Bashar Taleb Agence France-Presse Palestinian children rummage through a pile of trash around an internally displaced persons camp in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, July 18, 2024.

France Media Agency to Deir al-Balah

Published yesterday at 12:03 p.m. Updated yesterday at 7:38 p.m.

• Middle East

Oum Nahed Abou Shar no longer sleeps at night. Because of the bombings, of course, but also because of the pestilential smell and the swarms of flies in the Gaza Strip, where a health crisis threatens to strike in the tenth month of war.

This is what the Dutch peace promotion NGO PAX fears, which assures, in a report published Thursday, that the Gaza Strip now finds itself “drowning” under a mountain of waste and rubble, vectors of diseases and contamination of all kinds.

“We only suffer, we don't live,” laments Umm Nahed Abu Shar, a 45-year-old mother, in a tent in a displaced persons camp in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the small Palestinian territory devastated by the war between Israel and Hamas that began on 7 October.

“The heat, the diseases, the flies, the mosquitoes […], all of this is hurting us,” she tells AFP.

These days, “we can't sleep at night because of the smell of sewage,” she says, while the pumping stations stopped working on Tuesday due to lack of fuel, according to the Deir al-Balah town hall.

In a Gaza Strip on its knees, already deprived of electricity by Israel has been under siege for nine months, and the municipality fears a “health and environmental catastrophe” for more than 700,000 people.

For Ms. Abou Shar, this is already a reality. Her children, she says, are “constantly sick from something that spreads through waste.”

To the hunger that grips the approximately 2.4 millions of Palestinians in Gaza now face the risk of scabies, chickenpox, skin rashes and the spread of lice, say doctors there.

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And Thursday evening, the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government for Gaza announced the detection of the presence of the polio virus following tests carried out “on samples of wastewater in coordination with UNICEF”.

The Israeli Ministry of Health, for its part, indicated that the presence of a “type 2” polio virus (a strain considered eradicated since 1999 by the World Health Organization) had been “noted in samples of wastewater from the Gaza region” tested in a laboratory in Israel.

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Water, “weapon of war”

Oum Youssef Abou al-Qumsan is also one of the displaced from Deir al-Balah. This 60-year-old grandmother claims to lead a life of misery there, “between rubbish and insects”.

Almost every day, she waits in a queue to see a nurse. She takes her grandchildren there. There are still medications, “but we don’t know if it’s safe to eat or drink” water, she worries.

According to a report by the NGO Oxfam published Thursday, the quantity of water available in Gaza has collapsed by 94% since October 7, the date of the unprecedented attack by Hamas commandos in the south of Gaza. Israel which started the war.

The attack led, on the Israeli side, to the death of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count established based on official Israeli data.

In response, Israel launched an offensive in the Palestinian territory, which has so far left 38,848 dead, mostly civilians. , based on data from the Gaza Ministry of Health.

On site, denounces Oxfam, “Israel uses water as a weapon of war”, causing “a deadly health disaster”. The quantity of water available to a Gazans is now only 4.74 liters per day, or “less than a third of the minimum quantity recommended in emergency situations”.

“We suffer from the nauseating smell of waste, smoke [from fires and bombings] and heat,” also says Muhammad al-Kahlot, of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza.

The problem of waste, which piles up in a territory relentlessly shelled by the Israeli army, poses a deep and long-term threat, according to PAX, which has, for its study, analyzed satellite images on which 225 open-air recycling centers appear.

PAX warns against the formation of a “chemical soup” fueled by heavy metals accumulated bombing after bombing, which could end up contaminating groundwater and soil.

“If the danger for Gaza is imminent, the entire region could soon face serious ecosystem and public health problems”, anticipates PAX.

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