Israel-Hamas War: Who Are the Silent Killers Stalking Gaza’s Children, Civilians?

Residents of Gaza who have survived the war between Israel and Hamas now face a persistent threat from a silent, invisible killer: disease. People stuffed together in refugee camps or in so-called safe enclaves like Al-Mawasi face the threat of disease due to lack of food and clean water and shelter.

A report by Reuters pointed out that due to a lack of essential items needed by doctors, the entire health system in Gaza is on its knees. Doctors operating in Gaza as well as aid workers told the news agency that inevitable epidemics will rip the enclave apart.

The report by Reuters pointed out that cases of diarrhoea in children under five jumped 66% to 59,895 cases, and climbed 55% for the rest of the population in the same period, citing data from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

WHO fears the numbers could be higher but it is impossible to ascertain as the healthcare system in the coastal blockaded enclave was already struggling pre-October 7 attacks and the Israeli retaliation has led to a complete meltdown.

The perfect storm for disease has begun. Now it’s about, ‘How bad will it get?'” James Elder, chief spokesperson for the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).

Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, speaking to the news agency, said that his ward was filled children suffering extreme dehydration, causing kidney failure in some cases. He is the head of the paediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Al-Farra says he knows of 15 to 30 cases of Hepatitis A in Khan Younis in the past 14 days. “The incubation period of the virus is three weeks to a month, so after a month there will be an explosion in the number of cases of Hepatitis A,” Al-Farra was quoted as saying by news agency Reuters.

21 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals are closed, 11 are partially functional and four are minimally functional, the news agency said citing the WHO.

“The first is an epidemic of something like dysentery will spread across Gaza, if we continue at this pace of cases, and the other certainty is that neither the ministry of health nor the humanitarian organisations will be able to support the response to those epidemics,” Marie-Aure Perreaut, emergency medical coordinator for MSF’s operations in Gaza, said after evacuating a health centre in Khan Younis 10 days earlier.

Academic researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine last month in a research paper warned that the indirect health effects of the conflict would worsen over time. They warned of increased burden of infant malnutrition due to disrupted feeding and care as well as worsening nutrition of mothers.

Aid workers in Gaza say that what the researchers predicted is turning out to be true. They fear the diseases will kill as many children as the war has.

Terrorist group Hamas, which rules Gaza, claims close to 19,000 people, two-thirds of them women and children, have died due to Israeli retaliation which happened due to a terrorist attack that they led, killing over 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7.

The war has now internally displaced 1.3 million Gazans stuffing them into so-called safety sites in a thin strip of land by the Mediterranean Sea. “Many of the shelters are overwhelmed with people seeking safety, with four or five times their capacity. Most of the shelters are not equipped with toilets or showers or clean water,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications said.

Touma said they are not fully equipped to function properly because 135 staff of UNRWA have been killed and 70% of staff have fled their homes due to the war due to which the agency is operating only nine of the 28 primary health clinics.

“The practice of medicine is under attack,” UN special rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, said. Over 300 Gazan health workers and ministry staff were killed since the attacks.

The head of the paediatric ward Al-Farra said the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption and there are no medicines to treat the unwell children.

Salim Namour, a Syrian surgeon who treated the sick and wounded in eastern Ghouta outside Damascus during a years-long siege imposed by the Syrian government, told the news agency: “Siege … is a way to cause society to collapse. It means hunger, it means shortages of medical supplies, no electricity, no refrigeration, no way to preserve medicines or food, no heating”.