Oum Nahed Abou Shar no longer sleeps at night. Because of the bombings, of course, but also because of the foul smell and the swarms of flies in the Gaza Strip, where a health crisis threatens to strike in the tenth month of war.
This is what the Dutch peace-promoting NGO PAX fears, which assures, in a report published Thursday, that the Gaza Strip now finds itself “drowned” under a mountain of waste and rubble, vectors of diseases and contaminations of all kinds.
“We only suffer, we don’t live,” laments Umm Nahed Abu Shar, a 45-year-old mother, in a tent in a displaced persons camp in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the small Palestinian territory devastated by the war between Israel and Hamas that broke out on 7 October.
“Heat, diseases, flies, mosquitoes […]”All this hurts us,” she told AFP.
These days, “we can’t sleep at night because of the smell of sewage,” she says, while the pumping stations stopped working on Tuesday due to lack of fuel, according to the Deir al-Balah town hall.
In a Gaza Strip on its knees, already deprived of electricity by Israel for nine months of siege, the municipality fears a “health and environmental catastrophe” for more than 700,000 people.
For meme Abou Shar, it is already a reality. Her children, she says, are “constantly sick because of something that is spread through the garbage.”
Added to the hunger that grips Gaza’s 2.4 million Palestinians are the risks of scabies, chickenpox, skin rashes and the spread of lice, doctors there say.
And on Thursday evening, the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza announced the detection of the presence of the polio virus following tests carried out “on wastewater samples in coordination with UNICEF.”
The Israeli Ministry of Health indicated for its part that the presence of a “type 2” polio virus (a strain considered eradicated since 1999 by the World Health Organization) had been “detected in samples of wastewater from the Gaza region” tested in a laboratory in Israel.
Water, a “weapon of war”
Oum Youssef Abou al-Qumsan is also among the displaced people from Deir al-Balah. This 60-year-old grandmother says she leads a life of misery there, “between the rubbish and the insects”.
Almost every day, she waits in line to see a nurse. She takes her grandchildren there. Medicines can still be found, “but we don’t know if it’s safe to eat or drink” water, she worries.
According to a report by the NGO Oxfam published on Thursday, the quantity of water available in Gaza has collapsed by 94% since October 7, the date of the unprecedented attack by Hamas commandos in southern Israel which triggered the war.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
In response, Israel launched an offensive in the Palestinian territory, which has so far killed 38,848 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry.
On the ground, Oxfam denounces that “Israel is using water as a weapon of war”, causing “a deadly health catastrophe”. The quantity of water available to a Gazan is now only 4.74 litres per day, or “less than a third of the minimum quantity recommended in emergency situations”.
“We suffer from the nauseating smell of waste, smoke [des incendies et des bombardements] and heat,” says Muhammad al-Kahlot of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza.
The problem of waste, which is piling up in a territory relentlessly pounded by the Israeli army, carries a deep and long-term threat, according to PAX, which, for its study, analyzed satellite images showing 225 open-air dumps.
PAX warns of the formation of a “chemical soup” fueled by heavy metals accumulated from bombing after bombing, which could end up contaminating groundwater and soil.
“If Gaza is in imminent danger, the entire region could soon face serious ecosystem and public health problems,” PAX predicts.