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Diarrhea, chickenpox, scabies and upper respiratory infections are proliferating in a “very worrying” disease outbreak, the World Health Organization said Wednesdayadding that younger children and immunocompromised people were at particular risk.
Since mid-October, more than 33,500 cases of diarrhea have been reported, more than half of them among children under five years old, the group said. Before the war, there were an average of 2,000 cases of diarrhea per month among children of that age, according to the organization.
In recent weeks, almost 9,000 cases of scabies and lice, more than 12,600 cases of skin rash and almost 55,000 cases of upper respiratory tract infections have proliferated in the densely populated territory, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been crowded into shelters managed by the United Nations. said the WHO.
Aid agencies estimate that 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes in Gaza. It is unclear how many will have homes to return to; The United Nations estimates that almost half of the territory’s homes have been damaged or destroyed.
As fuel and medicine run out, Gaza’s healthcare system is collapsing. Doctors are forced to spend negligible resources treating the sick and injured and make impossible decisions about who lives and who dies.
The U.N. humanitarian office said all 120 municipal water wells in the Gaza Strip were expected to close by Thursday due to fuel depletion. The water coming in across the border with Egypt in aid convoys is only 4 percent of what is needed, the office said in its Daily update.
Shelters run by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees, are so overcrowded that an average of 160 people share a bathroom and there is one shower for every 700 people, according to the United Nations.