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Wafaa Elwan’s five-year-old son can’t sleep in the tent city in Gaza where she and her seven children take refuge, but the guns of war aren’t the cause of her daily nightmares.
“My son can’t sleep through the night as he can’t stop scratching his body,” the worried mother said.
The boy has white and red patches on his feet and legs, and even more under his T-shirt. He is one of many in Gaza who suffer from skin infections ranging from scabies to chicken pox, lice, impetigo and other debilitating rashes.
More than 150,000 people in the Palestinian territory have fallen ill with skin diseases due to the unsanitary conditions in which displaced Gazans have been forced to live since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, according to the World Health Organization.
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“We sleep on the ground, on the sand, with worms crawling out from under us,” said Elwan. His family is one of thousands living on a sandy plain by the sea near Gaza’s central city of Deir al-Balah.
Elvan believes that infection is inevitable. “We cannot bathe our children like before. We have no hygiene and sanitary products to wash and clean the place. There is nothing.”
Parents used to take their children to bathe in the Mediterranean Sea. But pollution caused by the war has destroyed infrastructure and increased the risk of disease.
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“The sea is full of excreta. They even throw garbage and children’s napkins into the sea,” he said.
The World Health Organization has reported 96,417 cases of scabies and lice, 9,274 cases of smallpox, 60,130 cases of skin rashes and 10,038 cases of impetigo since the war began in Gaza.
Scabies and smallpox are particularly widespread in the coastal Palestinian territory, according to Sami Hamid, a pharmacist who runs a makeshift clinic in the Deir al-Balah camp.
blisters and scabs
Two boys at the clinic showed dozens of blisters and scabs from chickenpox on their arms, legs, backs and stomachs.
In the absence of medicines, Hamid, 43, himself a displaced person, applied calamine lotion on the boys’ skin to relieve the itching.
Children’s skin is affected due to “hot weather and lack of clean water,” he said.
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Mohammed Abu Mugaiseb, medical coordinator in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told AFP that children are vulnerable because “they are children – they play outside, they will touch anything, they will eat anything without washing them.”
Abu Mugaisib said hot weather causes sweat and dirt to accumulate, causing rashes and allergies, which if scratched, can lead to infections.
“People are not staying indoors anymore, there is no proper hygiene,” he said.
MSF doctors fear the emergence of other skin diseases such as leishmaniasis, which can be fatal in its most severe form.
He said Gaza’s children are already highly vulnerable to disease because their immune systems are weakened by malnutrition.
Pharmacist Hamid said his team recently visited a temporary school where 24 out of 150 students were suffering from itching.
“Some of them have skin infections and unfortunately the infection is spreading among them,” Ola al-Kula, a teacher at a makeshift tent school, told AFP.
The World Health Organization has warned that other diseases are also spreading due to poor hygiene in displaced people’s camps.
“The toilets here are primitive, with water flowing into drains located between the tents, which ultimately contributes to the spread of the epidemic,” Hamid said.
The World Health Organization said 485,000 cases of diarrhea had been reported.
Gaza’s total population is about 2.4 million, of which 1.9 million are displaced, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The war began with a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli data.
Israel’s retaliatory strikes have killed at least 37,925 people, the vast majority of them civilians, according to health ministry figures in the Hamas-run Gaza region.
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