Heat and thirst drive families in Gaza to drink water that makes them sick

Deir Al-Balah: After waking early to stand in line for an hour under the August heat, Rana Odeh returns to her tent with her jug of murky water. She wipes the sweat from her brow and strategises how much to portion out to her two small children. From its colour alone, she knows full well it’s likely contaminated.

Thirst supersedes the fear of illness. She fills small bottles for her son and daughter and pours a sip into a teacup for herself. What’s left she adds to a jerrycan for later.

“We are forced to give it to our children because we have no alternative,” Odeh, who was driven from her home in Khan Younis, said of the water. “It causes diseases for us and our children.”

Such scenes have become the grim routine in Muwasi, a sprawling displacement camp in central Gaza where hundreds of thousands endure scorching summer heat. Sweat-soaked and dust-covered, parents and children chase down water trucks that come every two or three days, filling bottles, canisters and buckets and then hauling them home, sometimes on donkey-drawn carts.

Each drop is rationed for drinking, cooking, cleaning or washing. Some reuse what they can and save a couple of cloudy inches in their jerrycans for whatever tomorrow brings — or doesn’t.

When water fails to arrive, Odeh said, she and her son fill bottles from the sea.

Over the 22 months since Israel launched its offensive, Gaza’s water access has been progressively strained. Limits on fuel imports and electricity have hampered the operation of desalination plants while infrastructure bottlenecks and pipeline damage choked delivery to a dribble.

Gaza’s aquifers became polluted by sewage and the wreckage of bombed buildings. Wells are mostly inaccessible or destroyed, aid groups and the local utility say.

Meanwhile, the water crisis has helped fuel the rampant spread of disease, on top of Gaza’s rising starvation. UNRWA — the UN agency for Palestinian refugees — said Thursday that its health centres now see an average 10,300 patients a week with infectious diseases, mostly diarrhea from contaminated water.

Efforts to ease the water shortage are in motion, but for many the prospect is still overshadowed by the risk of what may unfold before new supply comes.

And the thirst is only growing as a heat wave bears down, with humidity and temperatures in Gaza soaring on Friday to 35 degrees Celsius. Mahmoud al-Dibs, a father displaced from Gaza City to Muwasi, dumped water over his head from a flimsy plastic bag — one of the vessels used to carry water in the camps.