Sewage contamination threatens Palestinians’ health

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Putrid rubbish piles and sewage-contaminated puddles are increasingly encroaching on the makeshift encampments of displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza, compounding the health risks facing people who have fled Israel’s attacks.

“We suffer from foul smells and illnesses among children, who are always suffering from colds,” said Sayed Rafik Abu Shanab, who lives in the southern city of Rafah, where the majority of Gazans have sought refuge from the conflict.

“The sewers here are infested with mosquitoes, which bite people and transfer infections to others.”

While the United Nations warns of imminent famine, after more than five months of conflict between Israel and Hamas militants, humanitarian officials say fast-deteriorating sanitation conditions are making Gazans even more vulnerable.

“Sanitation is one of the key drivers for the nutritional crisis, the health crisis, and I would even say food insecurity as well,” Jamie McGoldrick, UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, told a news briefing on Monday.

Weak immune systems

“People are hungry but they’re even more hungry because … their immune systems are being affected by their living conditions. People are living in very squalid, overcrowded conditions.”

The conflict in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in around 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, aimed at destroying Hamas, has killed at least 31,726 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

In Rafah, where the UN says the population has ballooned from around 300,000 to 1.5 million since October as civilians fled the fighting, survivors eke out a grim existence as they wait for a possible truce, dodging ever-growing mounds of rubbish during their daily hunt for food.

“There is no garbage collection,” McGoldrick said.

“At the side of the camps, at the side of the roads, there are piles of used papers, plastic, tins, remnants of food, etc.”

The dire sanitation situation in Rafah and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip has already resulted in a spike in hepatitis A, a liver inflammation caused by a virus that spreads via feces. It is not usually fatal.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in January there had been 24 confirmed cases as well as “several thousand people with jaundice, presumably also due to hepatitis A”.

Other diseases could thrive as the situation deteriorates, he said.