By Anas Baba
Rafah, Gaza, Dec 23 (EFE) .- The war in Gaza has caused widespread hunger, a shortage of medicines and a lack of proper hygiene, triggering the spread of infectious diseases to extremes never before seen in the enclave, a situation only expected with time.
A collapsed healthcare system, hours-long queues for bathing and a lack of adequate food supply have resulted in an ever-expanding number of cases of diseases in the Gaza Strip after two and a half months of Israel’s military offensive.
The situation was described as “catastrophic” by Dr. Maruan Shafik Ali, a term used by international agencies and humanitarian organizations to denote a crisis that continues to worsen.
Ali runs the Mohammed Yousef El-Najar Hospital in Rafah, in the south of the coastal enclave where more than a million Gazans displaced are crammed together.
“Before, the population of the city of Rafah was 300,000 people, but now with the displacement it has reached 1,300,000,” he told EFE.
“The medical teams were treating a large number of patients with infectious diseases, but now they can’t do more,” the doctor said.
More than 95,500 cases of diarrhea, 19,300 of scabies, 17,500 of parasites, 4,400 of smallpox, 1,900 of food poisoning, meningitis and other diseases, have been recorded – handwritten on a piece of paper – by the hospital, but Ali fears the actual numbers are double.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), diarrhea cases are 25 times more than before Oct. 7, when the war began.
WHO figures indicate more than 100,000 cases of diarrhea – half of them among children under five -, and more than 150,000 cases of respiratory infections, and other diseases such as meningitis, scabies, lice and chickenpox.
“If it’s cold, flu and respiratory illnesses will spread,” Ali feared, as winter could further worsen an already unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“A four-by-four-meter tent accommodates more than 20 people, which is why the flu is spreading,” he said, referring to camps for displaced persons, where even schools have been turned into shelters and houses host many families together.
Fuel to provide energy in hospitals and to extract potable water, both for drinking and washing in fields where thousands of displaced people are overcrowded, are only part of another long list of requirements in the Gaza Strip.
In fact many of the diseases plaguing the enclave would be easy to cure if there were means, but there appears to be no hope of the situation improving.
In one of these schools converted into a reception center, the family doctor, Mosaab al Mubayed, helps at Al Quds School in Rafah, where some 2,500 displaced people are housed.
Here, they lack medicines and those that come thanks to agencies such as the UN “are very, very few” leaving them no option than to administer “fewer doses” than necessary, he rued.
Smallpox, malaria and diarrhea are some of the diseases that are spreading unabated, especially among children in overcrowded displacement camps with no health services.
There are multiple cases of food poisoning from eating a lot of canned food, as hunger does not look at the expiry date.
There are no ambulances to tend to patients or equipment to make accurate diagnosis, apart from a general shortage of medicine. EFE
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