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Skin Diseases Afflict Gaza's Children as War Drags on Without End

Wateen al-Adasi is cared for at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip. The baby girl developed a skin condition due to malnutrition. )Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP- 3 Jul 2024)
Wateen al-Adasi is cared for at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip. The baby girl developed a skin condition due to malnutrition. )Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP- 3 Jul 2024)
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Skin Diseases Afflict Gaza's Children as War Drags on Without End

Wateen al-Adasi is cared for at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip. The baby girl developed a skin condition due to malnutrition. )Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP- 3 Jul 2024)
Wateen al-Adasi is cared for at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip. The baby girl developed a skin condition due to malnutrition. )Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP- 3 Jul 2024)

Like thousands of Gaza children, Yasmine Al-Shanbari, 3, is not only suffering from the upheaval of war all around them. She is ravaged by skin disease and no relief is in sight, with medicine scarce and few hospitals functioning in the Israeli-besieged enclave.

The 10-month-old war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas has left the Gaza Strip with no clean running water, a shortage of aid and medicine and raw sewage everywhere, giving rise to skin diseases and other afflictions.

Red scratchy patches have spread all over Yasmine's face and her father feels helpless as she sits in his lap in a burnt-out, crowded school where they have taken shelter in the Jabalia urban refugee camp in north Gaza, Reuters reported.

Tiny little insects were visibly flitting around her face, while piles of garbage rotted in the high summer heat outside.

"The disease she has on her face has been there for almost 10 days now and hasn't gone away," said her father, Ahmed Al-Shanbari. "We did not leave out any medicine to give to her, hoping it will clear up from her face."

The death toll continues to climb in Gaza, with almost 40,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza authorities.

Skin diseases are not the only illnesses that are creeping into one of the most densely populated places on earth.

"Yesterday, we were talking about hepatitis, and today we are talking about contagious skin diseases. Every day there are new diseases spreading among children," said Doctor Wissam al-Sakani, spokesman for Kamal Adwan Hospital.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has sounded the alarm that Hepatitis A and polio are also spreading among children.

"UN agencies warned of the high risk of the further spread of infectious diseases in Gaza, amid chronic water scarcity and no way to adequately manage waste and sewage," it said in a report earlier this month.

"The waste management system in Gaza has collapsed. Piles of trash are accumulating in the scorching summer heat. Sewage discharges on the streets while people queue for hours just to go to the toilets."

Israel denies responsibility for delays in getting urgent humanitarian aid into Gaza, says the UN and others are responsible for its distribution once inside the enclave.

Ammar al-Mashharawi, a 2-year-old toddler, also has a fiery red rash all over his face and body in Kamal Adwan Hospital, which was struck by Israeli missiles in May.

"Look at the child, his whole body is like this. We have been to more than one hospital to find medicine for him," said Ammar's father Ahmed as he held his wailing son while medical staff checked him.

"We adults manage somehow, but the children, God help them, have no food or medicine. The situation is indescribable," Ahmed added.

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Nearly 40,000 and Counting: The Struggle to Keep Track of Gaza Deaths

A man carries the shrouded body of a child killed in an Israeli bombardment to the hospital morgue in the south Gaza city of Rafah - AFP
A man carries the shrouded body of a child killed in an Israeli bombardment to the hospital morgue in the south Gaza city of Rafah - AFP
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Nearly 40,000 and Counting: The Struggle to Keep Track of Gaza Deaths

A man carries the shrouded body of a child killed in an Israeli bombardment to the hospital morgue in the south Gaza city of Rafah - AFP
A man carries the shrouded body of a child killed in an Israeli bombardment to the hospital morgue in the south Gaza city of Rafah - AFP

With much of Gaza reduced to rubble by 10 months of war, counting the dead has become a challenge for the health ministry, as the death toll nears 40,000.

Israel has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the daily figures put out by the ministry and US President Joe Biden did so too in the early stages of the war.

But several United Nations agencies that operate in Gaza have said the figures are credible and they are frequently cited by international organizations.

Two AFP correspondents witnessed health facilities enter deaths in the ministry's database.

Gaza health officials first identify the bodies of the dead, by the visual recognition of a relative or friend, or by the recovery of personal items.

The deceased's information is then entered in the health ministry's digital database, usually including name, gender, birth date and ID number.

When bodies cannot be identified because they are unrecognisable or when no one claims them, staff record the death under a number, alongside all the information they were able to gather.

Any distinguishing marks that may help with later identification, whether personal items or a birthmark, are collected and photographed.

Gaza's health ministry has issued several statements setting out its procedures for compiling the death toll.

In public hospitals under the direct supervision of the territory's Hamas government, the "personal information and identity number" of every Palestinian killed during the war are entered in the hospital's database as soon as they are pronounced dead.

The data is then sent to the health ministry's central registry on a daily basis.

For those who die in private hospitals and clinics, their information is taken down on a form that must be sent to the ministry within 24 hours to be added to the central registry, a ministry statement said.

The ministry's "information center" then verifies the data entries to "ensure they do not contain any duplicates or mistakes", before saving them in the database, the statement added.

Gaza residents are also encouraged by Palestinian authorities to report any deaths in their families on a designated government website. The data is used for the ministry's verifications.

The ministry is staffed with civil servants that answer to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority as well as to the Hamas-led government in Gaza.

An investigation conducted by Airways, an NGO focused on the impact of war on civilians, analysed the data entries for 3,000 of the dead and found "a high correlation" between the ministry's data and what Palestinian civilians reported online, with 75 percent of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry's list.

The study found that the ministry's figures had become "less accurate" as the war dragged on, a development it attributed to the heavy damage to health infrastructure resulting from the war.

For instance, at southern Gaza's Nasser Hospital, one of the few still at least partly functioning, only 50 out of 400 computers still work, its director Atef al-Hout told AFP.

Israeli authorities frequently criticize the ministry's figures for failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians. But neither the army nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny the scale of the overall toll.

The press office of Gaza's Hamas government estimates that nearly 70 percent of the roughly 40,000 dead are women (about 11,000) or children (at least 16,300).

Several UN agencies, including the agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), have said the ministry's figures are credible.

"In the past -- the five, six cycles of conflict in the Gaza Strip -- these figures were considered as credible and no one ever really challenged these figures,", the agency's chief Philippe Lazzarini said in October.

A study by British medical review The Lancet estimated that 186,000 deaths can be attributed to the war in Gaza, directly or indirectly as a result of the humanitarian crisis it has triggered.