In his simple tent in southern Gaza, Mustafa Shaban built a makeshift toilet for his family behind a curtain in a corner. He dug a hole in the sandy soil, poured a concrete slab around it, placed a bottomless bucket over the hole, and topped it with a worn-out plastic toilet seat.
A foul odor permeates the space, and flies and mosquitoes swarm nearby, close to where the family sleeps and prepares their meals. Every week, Shaban has to empty the septic tank from the hole, but he considers it at least more private than the public toilets used by hundreds of other people in their sprawling camp.
“I didn’t want my children and wife to use any public toilet. It’s humiliating,” said Shaban, 38, who was displaced from his hometown of Rafah by Israeli forces two years ago and now lives in a camp for displaced people in Khan Younis. “It’s humiliating,” he added, describing the toilet inside the tent. “The situation is disgusting, but at least it preserves our dignity better.”
There are no proper toilets in the vast tent cities that house most of Gaza’s 1.7 million displaced Palestinians, left homeless by the war. Displaced families have been forced to dig their own latrines, some of which are shared by extended families.
At the few public toilets in the camps, men, women, and children wait in long lines, then relieve themselves behind thin cloths or metal sheets that separate them from the crowds of strangers outside. Women are afraid to walk to these toilets at night.
The result is a veritable health nightmare. The stench permeates the tightly packed tents, and pools of sewage accumulate as the latrines overflow or residents manually empty their latrines.
Human rights groups say that more than 80% of Gaza’s sewage pumping stations have been completely destroyed by Israeli bombing and military operations over the past two and a half years.
