Gaza's broken water system crippling children with sickness. Eight months of war have reduced nine-year-old Yunis Jumaa to skin and bone.
Stretched out, semi-unconscious on a hospital bed in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, his twisted frame is hard to look at.
His arms and legs like matchsticks, his knee joints bulging, his chest heaves with the skin stretched tight over his rib cage.
“My son was in excellent health before, he was normal,” says his mother Ghanima Jumaa.
“But when he developed this malnutrition and dehydration, he became as you see him now.”
“There is no bottled water. The children walk a long distance - when they get water it reaches us contaminated,” Ghanima says.
Along the corridor at Nasser hospital lies five-year-old Tala Ibrahim Muhammad al-Jalat.
She is just about awake but not moving, her milky eyes rolled to the back of her head.
Tala, 5, and her family have been forced to live in a tent
Tala too is severely dehydrated and malnourished.
By her bedside her father Ibrahim Muhmmad al-Jalat holds her hand, careful not to disturb the intravenous drip feeding into her wrist.
He knows that the scorching weather, with temperatures close to 40 degrees, and a lack of clean water have brought his daughter close to death.
“The situation is getting worse,” he says.
“The temperature in our tent is unimaginable, and the water we drink is definitely contaminated, because both young and old are getting sick.”
And with their houses destroyed, hundreds of thousands of Gazans are now displaced, living under canvas in makeshift camps, with little protection from the scorching sun.
Getting water, whether it is clean or not, is a daily struggle. Long queues form at distribution centres.
With the sewage system badly damaged and with few toilets, what water there is is easily contaminated.
“It is no secret that the biggest cause of intestinal infections currently occurring in the Gaza Strip is the contamination of the water supplied to these children,” says Dr Ahmed al-Fari, head of the children’s departments at Nasser Hospital.
THIS AND MORE UPDATES AT: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd119dz515wo
No comments:
Post a Comment