Rats, fleas and endless queues: Inside the daily misery of Gaza’s tent camps

A municipal worker disinfects tents and pathways at a camp in Khan Yunis after a major pest infestation, southern Gaza Strip, in April. Fleas come out at night, toddlers cry in pain, and no one sleeps through the night.

Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 26 April 2026:

Rats tap-dance into the tent at night, skipping over sleeping children and parents trying to fall asleep, sometimes biting the tip of a nose or an ankle. They rummage through the stew recently brought from a public kitchen, gnaw at the flour sack and clothes, and then everything must be thrown away. Outside, they gather near piles of rubble or heaps of garbage. Under the rubble, one can assume they have found bodies. In the garbage, they find other food.

Fleas also come out at night from blankets or piles of clothes and attack. Everyone wakes from bites and itching. Toddlers cry in pain, and no one sleeps through the night. In the morning, small bloodstains are discovered.

This is the Gaza Strip: there is no refuge or rest, even before considering the daily Israeli bombings, the killed, the funerals.

In the second week of April, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “an alert system… across displacement sites indicated that rodents or pests were frequently visible in 1,326 of the 1,644 assessed sites (81 per cent)” in Gaza. Some 1.45 million people, out of roughly 1.7 million tent dwellers, were exposed to the harmful effects of rats or bedbugs, fleas or lice, mice or cockroaches – whether some of them or all of them together.

All are carriers of disease. Children are especially susceptible to allergies and skin diseases develop. The bombed, shattered and impoverished health care system, whose medical teams try their best to alleviate suffering, does not have enough ointments to treat these conditions.

Now, with the weather warming, the problem will worsen, estimates Yasmin, a 35-year-old educator. Some people have sprayed their tents with pesticides found in the market, but the effect lasted only a few days before the rats and fleas returned. Others cannot afford them.

Between April 14 and 19, OCHA reported, the Site Management Cluster coordinated fumigation across 21 designated emergency shelters and 30 nearby displacement sites in Rafah and Khan Yunis. Some 35,000 people, or 6,950 families, are now enjoying a reprieve from pest attacks and hope it will last more than a few days.

“The Israeli authorities have approved the import of essential pesticides, insecticides, and equipment to support implementation of the plan,” the report stated. Who knows how long it will take between approval and the arrival of the materials.

The rats and fleas are only one feature in an unending nightmare, Yasmin says.

“There’s no privacy. All the time you hear the most intimate sounds of our lives. Our entire lives are queues. In the morning, a queue for the public toilet at the nearest school or at the tent camp. I’m not talking about the humiliation of waiting and the smells. Then a queue for bread. A queue for a hot meal at the communal kitchen. A queue for aid supplies. A queue to charge a mobile phone. A queue for gas. A queue for water. And from place to place, stinking sewage streams.”

Waiting in line for water at a pumping and distribution point, then dragging the container back to the tent, is the job of 6-year-old Yazid, as he told me in a voice recording he left on WhatsApp. The internet is too weak to hold a conversation.

“Our lives are hard,” he said, sounding like an adult.  He is the son of Laila, a survivor of one of the Israeli bombings that struck an entire family in 2008-09. Sometimes a tanker carrying purified or clean water passes by the tents. If there is no purified water, they drink water unfit for consumption.

“Even boiling water is a whole production,” Yasmin says. “There’s a shortage of lighters. Each one costs 45 shekels ($15). And even with a lighter, it takes time to ignite a plank and cardboard. There’s a shortage of gas, of fuel. That’s why there are almost no cars on the roads, only donkey-drawn carts.

“What used to be roads are full of potholes, stones, broken asphalt and concrete. Wheels get stuck in potholes and hit stones. My back aches and is bruised. My menstrual bleeding lasts longer than usual. The owner of the cart or car wants us to pay in shekels, in small change. Not everyone is willing to accept payment for a short ride through a banking app. And if there’s no small change, sometimes I end up giving him 20 shekels ($7) for a distance of two kilometers.”

Some cars run on cooking oil. Neighborhood generators that provide power in some places, especially where residential buildings are still standing, also run on cooking oil. A method has long been found to melt plastic bags and turn them into fuel. Eight-year-old children collect the plastic and receive a few coins for it.

Yasmin and Laila say they want to leave the country, to emigrate, to live like human beings. Ihab, an academic, left with his family for a Western country about two years ago. He represents tens of thousands of others his age, between 40 and 65, who managed to escape the war.

“I lost everything. Two hundred family members killed, some 40 first-degree relatives and the rest second and third-degree. I lost friends. Social connections. A good job. My home. My certificates and approvals for my academic degree. True, I am living in safety now and we don’t lack food, but my life here has no meaning, no value.”

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