GAZA STRIP: A steady stream of grieving children and worried parents flowed into the dermatology office of Nasser Hospital in central Gaza.
Her mother cried as a girl with blue hair in a bow showed how the red and white marks covering her face spread to her neck and chest.
Another woman lifted her little boy's clothes to reveal scars on his back, buttocks, thighs and stomach. On his wrists, there were open wounds from the ashes. A father propped his daughter up on a desk so the doctor could examine the wounds on her calf.
Skin diseases are rampant in Gaza, health officials say. The reason, they say, is the dire conditions in which thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes in overcrowded tent camps, along with the summer heat and the collapse of sanitation that has left pools of open sewage amid 10 months of Israeli bombardment and attacks. in the field.
Doctors are grappling with more than 103,000 cases of lice and scabies and 65,000 cases of skin rash, according to the World Health Organization.
Among Gaza's population of about 2.3 million, more than one million cases of acute respiratory infections have been recorded since the war began, along with more than half a million acute diarrhea and more than one million cases of jaundice, according to the United Nations Development Program. .
Sanitation, Palestinians say, is impossible in the tents, which are basically wooden frames with blankets or plastic sheets strung together in wide sections.
“There is no shampoo, no soap,” said Munira al-Nahl, who lives in the dunes outside the southern city of Khan Younis. “The water is dirty. All is sand and worms and dirt.”
Her family tent was crammed with her grandchildren, many of whom were scarred. A small boy stood up with red spots on his stomach. “One child gets it, and it spreads to all of them,” Al-Nahl said.
Palestinians in the camps say it is almost impossible to get clean water. Some bathe their children in the salt water of the nearby Mediterranean Sea. People have to wear the same clothes every day until they are able to wash them, then they wear them right away. Flies are everywhere. Children play in the littered sand.
“First she had a rash on her face. Then it spread to her stomach and her arms, her forehead. And it hurts. Itches. And there's no treatment. Or if there is, we can't afford it,” said Shaima Marsaud, cinders next to her young daughter. Sitting in a block structure, they live between the tents.
More than 1.8 million of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes. Most people are now crowded into a 50-square-kilometer area of dunes and coastal areas with almost no drainage and little water.
The distribution of humanitarian supplies, including soap, shampoo and medicine, has slowed, U.N. officials said, because Israeli military operations and general chaos in Gaza make it too dangerous for relief trucks to move.
“The solid waste management system has collapsed,” said Chitose Noguchi, deputy special representative of the United Nations Development Programme.
The UNDP said two pre-war landfills in Gaza were inaccessible amid the fighting and that it had set up 10 temporary sites. But Noguchi said more than 140 informal dumping sites have cropped up. Some of them are huge pools of human waste and filth.
