By Wafaa Shurafa & Mohammed Jahjouh | The Associated Press KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—A steady stream of miserable children and worried parents flowed into the dermatology office at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza.
DISPLACED child Sham al-Hessi, center, who suffers from skin disease, is covered with skin cream as she poses for a picture, at a makeshift tent camp in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip on Monday, July 29, 2024. Skin diseases are running rampant in Gaza, health officials say, from appalling conditions in overcrowded tent camps housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes.
Doctors are wrestling with more than 103,000 cases of lice and scabies and 65,000 cases of skin rashes, according to the World Health Organization. In Gaza’s population of some 2.3 million, more than 1 million cases of acute respiratory infections have been recorded since the war began, along with more than half a million of acute diarrhea and more than 100,000 cases of jaundice, according to the United Nations Development Program.
Her family’s tent was crammed with her grandchildren, many of whom had rashes. One little boy stood scratching the red patches on his belly. “One child gets it, and it spreads to all of them,” al-Nahhal said. More than 1.8 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes, often moving multiple times over the past months to get away from Israeli ground assaults or bombardment. The vast majority are now crowded into a 50-square-kilometer area of dunes and fields on the coast with almost no sewage system and little water.
“The solid waste management system has collapsed,” said Chitose Noguchi, the deputy special representative of the U.N. Development Program’s Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People. Nassim Basala, a dermatologist at Nasser Hospital, said they get 300 to 500 people a day coming in with skin diseases. After the most recent Israeli evacuation orders, more people have crowded into agricultural fields outside the city of Khan Younis, where insects are rife in the summer.
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