Wafaa Elwan’s five-year-old son cannot sleep in the Gaza tent city where she and her seven children have sought shelter. However, it is not the guns of war that cause his nightmares.
“My son can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body,” the anxious mother explained.
The boy has white and red blotches over his feet and legs, and more under his shirt. He is among many in Gaza suffering from skin infections, including scabies, chicken pox, lice, impetigo, and other debilitating rashes.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 150,000 people in the Palestinian territory have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions that displaced people in the enclave have been forced into since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
“We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us,” Elwan said. Her family is one of thousands living on a sandy patch near the sea close to the central Gaza city of Deir el-Balah.
Elwan believes infections are inevitable. “We cannot bathe our children as before. There are no hygiene and sanitary products for us to wash and clean the place. There’s nothing.”
Parents used to tell their children to wash in the Mediterranean, but pollution has increased the risk of disease as war devastates basic facilities.
“The sea is all sewage. They even throw garbage and baby napkins into the sea,” she said.
The WHO has reported 96,417 cases of scabies and lice since the start of the war, 9,274 cases of chickenpox, 60,130 cases of skin rashes, and 10,038 impetigo cases.
Scabies and chickenpox are particularly widespread in the coastal Palestinian territory, according to Sami Hamid, a pharmacist who runs a makeshift clinic in the Deir el-Balah camp. Two boys in the clinic showed dozens of distinctive chickenpox-induced blisters and scabs spread over their hands, feet, backs, and stomachs.
Lacking medicines, Hamid, 43, himself displaced, rubbed calamine lotion on the boys’ skin to soothe the itching.
Children’s skin suffers from “the hot weather and the lack of clean water,” he said.
Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, the medical coordinator in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said children are vulnerable because “they play outside, they’ll touch anything, eat anything without washing it.”
Abu Mughaiseeb added that hot weather increases sweat and the accumulation of dirt that causes rashes and allergies, which, if scratched, lead to infections.
“People are not living in houses anymore, there is no proper hygiene,” he said.
MSF doctors fear the appearance of other skin conditions, such as leishmaniasis, which can be fatal in its most virulent form.
Gaza’s children are already highly vulnerable to disease, he said, because their immune systems are compromised by malnutrition.
Hamid, the pharmacist, said his team recently visited a makeshift school where 24 of the 50 students had scabies.
Other diseases have also rampaged through camps for the displaced, feeding on poor hygiene, the WHO warned.
“The toilets here are primitive, draining into channels among tents, which ultimately contributes to the spread of epidemics,” said Hamid.
The WHO reported 485,000 cases of diarrhea have been reported.
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