LONDON – Harsh winter weather is making life even more difficult for hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Gaza, many of whom fled their homes months ago without warm clothes or blankets, according to the Guardian newspaper.
Some could not carry much and others did not think they would need to prepare for months of war, stretching into the coldest months of the year.
“I see a lot of people sleeping on the ground, with no mattress and no blankets,” said Mohammad Shaban, a doctor working in a makeshift hospital set up inside a school transformed into a refugee shelter. A few classrooms hold his 60 patients; the others shelter 1,700 refugees.
“It is cold and crowded, with 50 people in one room, which makes it easy for diseases to spread,” he said. “In the last week, because of the bad weather, we have a lot of cases from influenza and common cold.”
Even those who still have money struggled to find winter clothes and blankets in the markets that are still open, said Hiba Saleh, a mother of four children aged between one and 11, who fled northern Gaza.
Shops have sold out, secondhand clothes that might have been passed on have been abandoned or destroyed in bombing, and aid groups focus on bringing in food, medicine and water.
“The situation in the markets is very poor, there is nothing to meet people’s needs in terms of winter clothes or blankets, and aid from outside is very limited,” she said in a phone interview. “Previous wars in Gaza were not as extremely harsh as this one.”
Homes and schools are already crammed with refugees, so more recent arrivals are mostly living in the open. Saleh said a tent city had sprung up beside rooms her family rented a few weeks earlier, in a place with no water, sanitation, or other services.
Rain, which came on Friday and is expected to continue this week, deepens the misery. At the school where Shaban works as a doctor, it floods the grounds and a lack of sanitation for the huge number of people living there means a risk of sewage pollution.
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