Survivors of Israeli Bombardment Face New Catastrophe: Epidemics, Amputations, Starvation
"Everyone is malnourished, everyone is immunocompromised"
Murtaza HussainOct 15
Amid Israel’s brutal onslaught in Gaza, Israeli weapons makers have seen unprecedented
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As the northern Gaza Strip is subjected to a fresh campaign of massacres and enforced starvation, doctors working elsewhere in Gaza say that a quieter threat is now sweeping across the territory: chronic disease and infection.
One year into the conflict, attacks on civilians in the territory have continued to escalate, including bombings of hospitals and schools in the north that have inflicted a staggering number of civilian casualties. While clinics in the north have been overwhelmed by traumatic injuries from aerial bombings and other attacks, medical facilities in other parts of the Strip that are not presently the focus of this campaign have seen a relative decline in such injuries, doctors in Gaza told Drop Site News.
Amid this lull in trauma cases in other parts of the Strip, the full impact of disease and malnutrition on the Palestinian population is becoming clear to medical authorities, as patients grow desperate for access to the meager healthcare infrastructure still operating in the territory.
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“We are dealing with the health consequences of an entire population that has not had access to regular medical treatment for over a year, and where hundreds of thousands of people have been pushed out of homes to live in crowded tents without sanitation or access to clean water,” said Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon from North Carolina currently on a volunteer medical mission at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. “We are seeing huge numbers of people come in who have severe complications from easily treatable diseases and infections. It is getting to the point where it is becoming overwhelming.”
The war has seen direct attacks not just on medical facilities, but on sewage pumps, wastewater treatment plants, and wells, making potable water a scarcity for people living in Gaza. In July, video footage emerged of Israeli soldiers demolishing a water pump facility in the city of Rafah, one of many documented and intentional attacks on water infrastructure in the territory.
Khalid Mortaga, a 22-year-old U.S. citizen who remains stuck with his family in Deir al-Balah, a town in central Gaza, said that he and his family members have suffered from chronic skin diseases, hepatitis, and other ailments as a result of being forced to use contaminated water.
“On the first of October I was diagnosed with hepatitis. For the next ten days I was in bed most of the time, my face had gone pale and my eyes had turned yellow,” Mortaga said. “Many people around us in Deir al-Balah are also suffering this disease, but the most common health problems that most people suffer from are skin diseases as a result of the salty and dirty water that we are using for drinking and bathing.”
Mortaga shared photos with Drop Site News of rashes and other skin conditions that he and his family are presently suffering. “Many people are looking for medicine and can’t find it,” he said. “My mother went to a skin doctor and he prescribed her some medicine but she couldn’t find it. My father also has chronic sinusitis and can’t find the spray that he normally uses.” He and his family are still waiting on the State Department to help them evacuate.
Gathering accurate figures on the full impact of disease in Gaza is nearly impossible due to restrictions on entry to the territory and the collapse of the healthcare system during the war. Yet reports from medical personnel still working in Gaza paint a grim, consistent picture of a population succumbing to the ravages of disease.
