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Manar al-Hussi in his makeshift home in a camp in Dayr al-Balah in central Gaza on July 29. Her children suffer from skin problems caused by the sanitary conditions in the camp.
1 / 3Photo: Abd Al-Karim Hana/AP/TT
In the tent camps of the Gaza Strip, the nights are long.
The darkness is filled with the sounds of war: the buzz of Israeli drones, constant volleys of gunfire. Children who cry, others who scream.
Some cannot sleep at all. The fear of nocturnal attacks is too great.
– Mother, let me sleep in your arms. I don’t want to die.
Six-year-old Yasmine clings to her mother in the family’s tent in al-Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, designated a so-called safe zone in the brutal war between Israel and Hamas.
– My children are afraid to fall asleep, explains Safa Abu Yasin to AFP.
At night, she shares a thin mattress with her four daughters. Often she doesn’t sleep at all. Four-month-old Loujain keeps her awake.
– We want her to feel safe, but I don’t even have a cradle where she can rest, says Abu Yasin about the youngest daughter.
Wake up – to be able to escape
In Gaza’s overcrowded tent camps, the nights carry horrors. The war has deprived hundreds of thousands of people of what is needed for sleep: privacy, darkness, silence, the ability to control the temperature. In the tents, winter is freezing cold and summer is scorching.
Many ask for sleeping pills to endure the nights, says Eman Alakhras, a psychologist at the aid organization Doctors of the World, to AFP.
– There are those who cannot sleep because they do not want to die. Many have died before their eyes and they feel that they must be awake, so that they can escape if danger arises.
Farah Sharshara misses her pillow. In the tent camp of Dayr al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, the nights are unbearable.
– You always have to adapt to others, says the 32-year-old.
– There are those who snore, those who wake up screaming, crying out of fear. Then there are the insomniacs who just talk and disturb everyone else.
Lice and scabies
Most of the area’s roughly two million inhabitants have been forced to flee at least once during the war, according to the UN. Since the start of the war in October, almost 84 percent of the strip of land has been subject to Israeli evacuation orders on one or more occasions.
In the overcrowded tent camps, everything is in short supply, even clean water and soap. Lice, scabies, swine pox and other skin diseases thrive in the dirt, according to the World Health Organization WHO.
Sham al-Hussi cries as her mother tries to anoint her red-spotted body.
– It is terrible. There are always flies on her face, Manar al-Hussi told the AP news agency.
Rami, who like many Gazans was forced to flee several times during the war, shares a six by four meter tent with 26 relatives.
– Before the war, we all had our own rooms. Now we sleep on a plastic mat, a blanket and a foam mattress, he tells AFP.
FACTS The Gaza war in numbers
More than 40,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed since the start of the war, which followed the terror-labeled Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The figures come from health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Among the dead are nearly 300 aid workers, nearly 900 care workers and 170 journalists/media workers.
Around 1.9 million people are displaced within the borders of the Gaza Strip, according to UN estimates. Many of them have been forced to flee several times.
Close to half a million people in the area are estimated to be facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity, according to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
One million children are estimated to be in need of psychological and psychosocial support, Unicef states.
85 percent of all schools/teaching facilities have been destroyed in whole or in part, according to the UN agency Ocha. The same applies to 20 out of 36 hospitals.
Source: Ocha: Reported impact snapshot – Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024
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