Overcrowding – Gaza City municipality warns of disease spread in shelters
Palestinians inspect a school sheltering displaced people after it was hit by an Israeli strike, Nuseirat, central Gaza on 11 September 2024
The Palestine Chronicle reports on 26 November 2024:
The Gaza City Municipality warned on Monday of an outbreak of epidemics and diseases among displaced Palestinians in the besieged enclave due to overcrowding of shelters, Anadolu news agency reported.
In a statement, the municipality said that the mass displacement of Palestinians from the north of the Strip to Gaza City “has added more pressure on water, sanitation and waste collection services.”
“This has exacerbated the health and environmental crisis that the city is witnessing,” the statement added, according to Anadolu.
According to the municipality, “the forced displacement has caused unprecedented levels of waste accumulation and a significant increase in demand for water, making the situation extremely difficult.”
The Gaza City Municipality urged the international community to exert all efforts to help meet the basic needs of displaced Palestinians in the city “to avoid further deterioration in public health.”
Israel Impeding Aid
Several United Nations agencies and humanitarian aid organizations have repeatedly urged the Israeli occupation authorities since the onset of its genocidal war on Gaza to allow free access of aid into the Strip, but the majority of these calls have been rejected.
Only a few days ago, the United Nations Spokesman for the Secretary-General, Stéphane Dujarric, said that Israel only allowed one-third of 129 scheduled humanitarian aid missions into Gaza over the past week. Quoting the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Dujarric added on November 23 that “the rest were either denied, impeded or canceled due to security or logistical reasons.”