War fuels epidemics in Gaza – disease can become a “death sentence”

In Gaza, illness can be a death sentence. Cancer patients are waiting to die, polio has returned and many of the doctors and nurses who could have helped them are dead, while the hospitals where they worked lie in ruins.

Doctors and health experts say that even if the war between Israel and Hamas ended tomorrow, it would take years to rebuild the health sector and people would continue to die because preventable diseases were not treated in time.

“People are dying every day because they do not get the basic treatment they need,” says Riham Jafari, advocacy and communications coordinator for human rights organization ActionAid Palestine.

Cancer patients are “waiting for their turn to die,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a limited pause in fighting to allow children to be vaccinated against polio after a one-year-old boy was found to be partially paralyzed by the disease, the first case in the densely populated Gaza Strip in 25 years.

But even as crowds gathered for vaccinations in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis on September 5, bombs continued to fall in other areas. Health officials in the Gaza Strip said an Israeli strike killed five people at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah.

“It will take a long time and require great effort to restore the level of care we had in Gaza,” said Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, head of the medical program at Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Every day he sees about 180 children with skin diseases that he “simply cannot treat,” he said.

“Due to interruptions in vaccination campaigns, lack of supplies, shortages of hygiene items and infection prevention materials, health care is simply deteriorating.”

The conflict was triggered by an attack by Hamas fighters on southern Israel on October 7. According to Israeli sources, they killed 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages.

Since then, more than 40,800 Palestinians have been killed and about 92,000 injured by the Israeli offensive in the enclave, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

But in addition to the deaths caused by fighting and air raids, people are also succumbing to diseases that would be curable under normal circumstances.

As with the recurrence of polio, health experts say children will bear the brunt of these long-term consequences.

“We talk about disabilities, we talk about intellectual disabilities, mental health issues,” Aghaalkurdi said.

“Things that stay with the child until his death.”

SPECIALISTS KILLED

According to Gaza's Health Ministry, at least 490 health workers have been killed since the conflict began. A Reuters investigation found that 55 highly qualified medical specialists were among those killed.

With every specialist killed, a source of knowledge and human contacts is lost in Gaza. This represents a devastating blow, in addition to the destruction of most of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

Many people are weakened by the lack of food, with prices for basic commodities having more than quadrupled since the conflict began. And when they fall ill, they are too scared to go to one of the few remaining hospitals, Jafari says.

Eighty-two percent of children between the ages of 6 and 23 months have limited access to quality food, according to a report by the Global Network Against Food Crises, and more than 90 percent of children under the age of 5 suffer from infectious diseases.

At the same time, skin diseases are widespread due to the lack of cleaning and hygiene products, Jafari said. In the markets, a bottle of shampoo can cost around $50.

Israel has severely restricted the supply of food and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and humanitarian organizations are warning of famine.

Jafari expects a reckoning after the war ends.

“There is delayed suffering, delayed grief, there is disease that is delayed,” she said. “There is a whole journey of suffering that is delayed until the end of the war,” she said.

CANCER “DEATH SENTENCE”

Manal Ragheb Fakhri al-Masri, 42, is one of those facing this health challenge.

She and her nine children have been displaced seven times, suffer from heart disease and a benign tumor in her stomach and should have left Gaza earlier this year for treatment.

But then her husband was killed and she couldn't bear to leave her children.

Now, having also suffered several strokes, she is bedridden and unable to leave her seaside tent in Al-Mawasi, which Israel has declared a security zone. She has not received any medication for five months and has not even been able to shower for two weeks.

“My husband took care of me, got medicine and fed his children,” she said in a telephone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Now I don't know what to do. We lack the most basic things.”

Her children try to help as best they can, sometimes bringing her sea water to wash with, but the salty liquid gives her no relief. Her children also all suffer from red rashes, but they have no creams to soothe their burning limbs.

Waseem Alzaanin, a general practitioner with the Palestinian Red Crescent, said the lack of medicines, equipment and medical facilities was leading to the deaths of his cancer patients.

The only cancer center in Gaza was destroyed earlier this year, he said, and many of his stage one cancer patients are now classified as terminal cancer.

“The most basic conditions are not met. There is nothing we can do except give them painkillers and make the life they have left easier,” he said.

“It's like a death sentence,” he added. “Let's not kid ourselves. We don't have a health system.”