Gaza families keep vigil as rodents and pests infest displacement camps

LONDON: In Gaza’s tent camps, sleep has become a shift. Parents take turns through the night, not for warmth or safety from bombardment, but to watch for rats, scorpions and snakes.

For thousands of displaced families, the alternative can be waking to find a child bitten — or worse.

“Every summer, different kinds of pests appear,” said Maysa Yousef, an artist and mother of three in central Gaza. “This summer, we’re finding snakes and scorpions.”

Rats, she said, have become especially difficult to contain.

“Gaza is full of garbage, making it the perfect environment for rodents,” Yousef told Arab News. “They eat everything. They walk in front of you during the day or beside you as if they were members of the family.”

Her daughters are terrified. At night, they climb onto chairs rather than sit on the ground.

“They tell me, ‘Don’t let the rat walk next to me,’” Yousef said.

The rodents are one more hardship for Palestinians displaced by more than two years of war, many of whom are living in overcrowded tent encampments without reliable clean water, sanitation, waste collection or access to pest-control supplies.

As the weather warmed in spring, families began reporting rats and weasels chewing through tents, contaminating food and water and biting children.

Others described earwigs, fleas, snakes and scorpions inside shelters, while stray dogs and cats roam camp perimeters and rubbish-strewn streets.

Samar, 24, who lives in a tent in Gaza City, said she woke several nights ago after a rat crawled beneath her sheets and bit her foot. Her family also found rats swimming in a bucket of water her father had set aside for wudu, the ritual washing before Islamic prayers.

The infestation has spread through displacement sites where sewage runs between tents and uncollected rubbish piles up in the heat.

In early May, Save the Children warned that rats, mice and insects had swarmed displacement sites as temperatures rose, increasing health risks for an estimated 1.4 million people living in overcrowded camps.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said more than 80 percent of over 1,600 displacement sites assessed in mid-April reported rodents or pests frequently visible. Nearly two-thirds reported skin infections or rashes, more than 65 percent reported lice and more than half reported bedbugs.

Children are particularly exposed. About 680,000 — roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s children — are living in displacement sites affected by rodents or pests, according to the figures.

For residents, the problem is not limited to disease or discomfort. It has become a source of daily fear.

Saam Mohammed, a Gaza City resident, wrote on Facebook on Aug. 13 that earwigs had become widespread, describing them as a “crawling nightmare with pincers at the front of its body.”

Days earlier, he wrote, an earwig had crawled into an infant’s ear.

“Thankfully, it was removed with nothing but God’s mercy and a pair of tweezers,” Mohammed wrote. “In Gaza, the only constant amid all this destruction is that the crises keep multiplying, and they never seem to end.”

Fleas became another major problem in Al-Mawasi, a crowded coastal encampment. Children were left with bites so severe that some scratched until they bled.

“One woman told me she took her son’s clothes off at night because he had been crying so much and found him covered in blood from scratching the flea bites,” Yousef said.

Families made videos and appealed for help, but found few practical ways to protect themselves.

Yousef’s husband, a psychologist who coordinates World Health Organization-related work in Gaza, told her about repeated appeals for pesticides and other supplies.

“There was absolutely no response,” she said.

The lack of pesticides has left many families using crude methods, including sticks, adhesive traps and improvised attempts to catch animals. When pest-control products do appear in local markets, residents say, they are often priced beyond reach.

A municipal effort to reduce the number of weasels created an unexpected problem.

Nearly two months ago, according to Yousef, residents heard that the municipality would pay 5 shekels to anyone who killed a weasel, particularly in camps and tent areas.

“People began competing,” she said. “But once there was money for killing weasels, people competed over how to kill them.”

Some began catching and breeding weasels so they could turn them in for payment.

“People started saying the Gaza Strip would become ‘Weasel City,’” Yousef said. “They would breed weasels, let them multiply and keep them in cages at home to make more money.”

Residents eventually pushed for the incentive to be canceled, she said, arguing that authorities should distribute materials needed to eliminate the animals instead of creating a cash reward that could encourage their breeding.

The problem is rooted in Gaza’s broader collapse of sanitation and public-health systems. More than two years of war have devastated water networks, sewage systems, hospitals and waste collection, leaving crowded displacement sites surrounded by rubble, standing water and garbage.

That environment has helped fuel illnesses including scabies, pneumonia and diarrhea, residents and aid groups say, while creating conditions in which rats and insects thrive.

Yousef said the changing behavior of stray animals was another source of alarm.

In the early months of the war, she said, large areas of Gaza City and northern Gaza were emptied as people fled south. Entire residential blocks were bombed, leaving many bodies buried beneath collapsed buildings or exposed in places where no one could safely reach them.

“Some days, the death toll reached 1,000 or 1,700,” she said.

With neighborhoods deserted, Yousef said, dogs, cats and weasels fed on bodies beneath the rubble. Over time, she said, the animals became increasingly aggressive.

“The weasels that used to eat bodies are now the ones eating people while they sleep in tents,” she said. “Dogs began attacking people at night and attacking the tents. Even cats became unusually aggressive.”

Graphic videos showing stray animals feeding on dead bodies were circulated on social media.

Yousef remembers walking through bombed-out areas and seeing cats and dogs gathered around bodies that had not been recovered.

“I used to see bodies on the ground, with cats and dogs eating,” she said. “I would cry at night and pray: ‘God, if I die, please let my body remain intact and let it be buried whole. I don’t want anything else.’”

Residents tried to kill aggressive animals when they could, she said. Anyone with a weapon sometimes shot at them, but the animals reproduced quickly and were difficult to control.

Yousef said pest-control materials later began entering Gaza after concern grew that animals were crossing toward Israeli communities near the border.

“They began sending pesticides, traps and other things to bring them under control so they would not reach them,” she said. “Anything they want to contain so that it does not reach them, if its source is here, they allow in the materials needed for it.”

She said that before then, Gaza’s residents had been left without the pesticides or medicines needed to address bites and infestations.

“After these animals bite, there were no medicines in Gaza at all, not even Acamol,” she said, using a common local name for paracetamol.

For Yousef, the pest crisis cannot be separated from the larger devastation around her: the ruined homes, the people still believed buried under rubble and the basic protections that have disappeared from daily life.

“When I walk past houses with people buried underneath, my hair stands on end,” she said. “I greet them as I walk because I cannot comprehend that there are still people under that rubble who were never properly buried.

“The least a person deserves when they die is to be buried. In Gaza, that has become a dream.”