Gaza struggles with ‘perfect storm’ diseases as UNICEF expresses worries for children
For the besieged residents of Gaza who have so far survived Israel’s bombs and bullets, a silent, invisible killer is now stalking them: disease.
A lack of food, clean water and shelter have worn down hundreds of thousands of traumatised people and, with a health system on its knees, it’s inevitable epidemics will rip through the enclave, 10 doctors and aid workers told Reuters.
“The perfect storm for disease has begun. Now it’s about, ‘How bad will it get?'” James Elder, chief spokesperson for the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF), said in an interview on Tuesday.
From Nov. 29 to Dec. 10, cases of diarrhoea in children under five jumped 66% to 59,895 cases, and climbed 55% for the rest of the population in the same period, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO). The U.N. agency said the numbers were inevitably incomplete due to the meltdown of all systems and services in Gaza because of the war.
The head of the paediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, told Reuters on Tuesday his ward was overrun with children suffering extreme dehydration, causing kidney failure in some cases, while severe diarrhoea was four times higher than normal.
He said he was aware of 15 to 30 cases of Hepatitis A in Khan Younis in the past two weeks: “The incubation period of the virus is three weeks to a month, so after a month there will be an explosion in the number of cases of Hepatitis A.”
Since the truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on Dec. 1, hundreds of thousands of people have moved to makeshift shelters – abandoned buildings, schools and tents. Many others are sleeping in the open with little access to toilets or water to bathe, aid workers said.
At the same time, 21 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals are closed, 11 are partially functional and four are minimally functional, according to WHO figures from Dec. 10.
Marie-Aure Perreaut, emergency medical coordinator for MSF’s operations in Gaza, said the medical charity had left a health centre in Khan Younis 10 days ago – because the area was within Israel’s evacuation orders – where it had been treating respiratory tract infections, diarrhoea and skin infections,
She said two things were now inevitable.
“The first is an epidemic of something like dysentery will spread across Gaza, if we continue at this pace of cases, and the other certainty is that neither the ministry of health nor the humanitarian organisations will be able to support the response to those epidemics,” she said.
The U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said two months of brutal war combined with a “very tight siege” have forced 1.3 million Gazans out of a population of 2.3 million to seek safety at its sites in the strip of land by the Mediterranean Sea.
“Many of the shelters are overwhelmed with people seeking safety, with four or five times their capacity,” said Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications. “Most of the shelters are not equipped with toilets or showers or clean water.”
Since the war started, 135 staff of UNRWA have been killed and 70% of staff have fled their homes, two of the reasons why UNRWA is now operating only nine of the 28 primary health clinics it had prior to the war, Touma said.
All told, at least 364 attacks on healthcare services have been recorded in Gaza since Oct. 7, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, said in Dec. 7 statement.
“The practice of medicine is under attack,” she said.
More than 300 Gazan health ministry staff and medics have been killed since Oct. 7, the ministry said on Wednesday.
Reuters
