03/07/2024 – 10:53
Wafaa Elwane’s five-year-old son spends his nights scratching himself. He has a skin condition, like many other children in the Deir el Balah displacement camp in the central Gaza Strip, where families are overcrowded.
“We sleep on the ground, on the earth, where the worms come out,” the boy’s mother told AFP from her tent, set up among thousands of others on a plot of land.
“My son can’t sleep through the night because he keeps scratching his body,” laments Elwane, mother of seven children.
Since the start of the war in the Strip, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin infections due to the poor hygiene conditions in which displaced Palestinians survive, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“We don’t bathe our children like we used to. There are no hygiene products or disinfectants to clean our spaces,” explains Elwane.
Previously, families would send their children to wash in the Mediterranean Sea, but water pollution in recent days has made the problems worse, according to this mother.
“The sea is just sewage. Trash and diapers are thrown straight there,” he says.
The WHO has recorded 96,417 cases of scabies and lice among the Gaza population and 10,038 of impetigo, a bacterial skin infection.
At the makeshift clinic in Deir el Balah camp, Sami Haid, a 43-year-old volunteer pharmacist, points out that scabies is the most common skin infection, followed by chickenpox, which is viral in origin.
Two children with dozens of blisters and scabs characteristic of chickenpox, spread across their hands, feet, back and belly, are treated at the center.
The pharmacist applies calamine cream to soothe the itching, for lack of a better treatment.
– Risk of fatal disease –
Children’s skin suffers from “the heat and the lack of clean water,” explains Sami Hamid, also displaced from Gaza City.
These children “play outside, touch anything, eat anywhere without washing themselves,” adds Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
In hot weather, people sweat more and this adds to impurities that cause skin rashes that, if scratched too much, can lead to infections, explains Mughaiseeb, who fears the emergence of deadly skin diseases, such as leishmaniasis.
Children in Gaza are more vulnerable to disease because their immune systems have been weakened by malnutrition, creating “a vicious cycle,” according to the MSF coordinator.
During a visit to a school set up under a tent, Sami Hamid and his medical team confirmed that 24 out of every 150 students suffered from scabies.
“The toilets are rudimentary and lead to sewage between stores, which contributes to the spread of epidemics,” adds the pharmacist.
Due to poor hygiene conditions, other diseases are spreading in the displacement camps, warned the WHO, which reports 485,000 cases of diarrhea, of which more than 113,000 are in children under five years old.
The UN announced on Tuesday (2) that there are already 1.9 million displaced people in the Gaza Strip, out of a population of 2.4 million inhabitants.
The war erupted on October 7 when Islamist militiamen killed 1,195 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 251 in southern Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.
In response, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has already left at least 37,953 dead, most of them civilians, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas government, which has ruled the territory since 2007.
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