With great difficulty, Amani Mohsen managed to coax her eight-year-old son to sleep. She herself finally drifted off after a long day of work. The swarms of insects hovering above her family in the displacement camp, the buzzing flies and mosquitoes, and the painful bites they inflicted, turned the sweltering nights in the plastic tents of Gaza into a living hell.
This woman, in her mid-thirties, lives in the western part of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, known as Al-Mawasi. She was displaced and now lives in a tent after her family’s home, like most homes in the Strip, was destroyed during the Israeli ground offensive two years ago. She told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, recounting her ordeal like the rest of the residents: “During the day, it’s exhausting work: washing, preparing food and bread on open fires, and filling water containers. At night, it’s a battle with insects and rats.” Like other women in Gaza, Amani is forced to wake up early to prepare food and wash clothes, relying on her own hands. There are no electrical appliances to help, unlike before October 7, 2023. The conditions created by the war Israel launched against Gaza on that day have returned the situation to what it was some 70 years ago. There is no electricity, water is extremely difficult to obtain, and most residents live in tents and complain of a shortage of medicine.
“The situation is getting worse,” she says, pointing to the north of the displacement camp where she lives. “There’s a mountain of garbage there, growing every day.” She continues, “This mountain has become a breeding ground for flies, mosquitoes, and rats. At night, life is even harder than during the day, when we think about going to sleep, exhausted, to prepare ourselves for another day of hard work.”
In that area, the responsible municipal authorities were forced to dump the collected waste on land that was initially isolated from the first areas where displaced people were living. However, as the war dragged on for over 1,000 days, and the number of displaced people increased with the expansion of Israeli control over most of the Gaza Strip and the intensification of house demolitions, the waste began to accumulate adjacent to displacement camps and very close to the remaining partially damaged homes.
Since the first day of the war, the occupation authorities have prevented municipal crews from accessing the main waste dumps located east of the Gaza Strip. These dumps are currently located within the “yellow line” areas under full Israeli control. According to the municipal authorities, approximately one million tons of garbage have been collected in 23 temporary dumps, forming mounds, three years after the war.
