Reported by BBC News
Eight months of war have minimized nine-year-old Yunis Jumaa to skin and bone.
In southern Gaza, contracting out, semi-senseless on a hospital bed in Khan Younis, his deformed frame is difficult to appear at, as quoted by BBC NEWS.
His arms and legs look like matchsticks, his knee joints protruding, and his chest heaves with the skin lengthened closed over his rib enclosure.
“My son was in excellent health before, he was normal,” says his mother Ghanima Jumaa.
“But when he developed this malnutrition and dehydration, he became as you see him now.”
“There is no bottled water. The children walk a long distance – when they get water it reaches us contaminated,” Ghanima says.
Along the gallery at Nasser Hospital fibs five-year-old Tala Ibrahim Muhammad al-Jalat.
She is only about watchful but not thrusting, her milky eyes wadded to the rear of her head.
Tala too is extremely waterless and underweight.
By her bedside her father Ibrahim Muhmmad al-Jalat carried her hand, mindful not to trouble the intravenous bubble providing into her wrist.
He considers that the burning weather, with temperatures close to 40 degrees, and a deficiency of clean water have caused his daughter near to death.
“The situation is getting worse,” he says.
“The temperature in our tent is unimaginable, and the water we drink is contaminated, because both young and old are getting sick.”
And with their houses destroyed, hundreds of thousands of Gazans are now replaced, residing under canvas in homemade camps, with little security from the burning sun.
Obtaining water, if it is neat or not, is a daily effort. Long columns are built at issuance centres.
With the worst system badly destroyed and with few toilets, what water there is conveniently spoiled.
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“It is no secret that the biggest cause of intestinal infections currently occurring in the Gaza Strip is the contamination of the water supplied to these children,” claims Dr Ahmed al-Fari, head of the children’s departments at Nasser Hospital.
The first problem is intestinal infections with vomiting and diarrhea which causes dehydration,” he claims.
“The second problem is hepatitis C or A, which are no less dangerous than intestinal infections, if not more so.”
The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs says 67% of Gaza’s water and sanitation approach, poor at the finest of times, has now been wasted.
We need a biggest international strive to accomplish water and sewage networks,” claims Salaam Sharab, who’s a water architect in the Khan Younis metropolis.
“We in Khan Younis have lost between 170 and 200km of pipes, which have been destroyed, along with wells and water tanks.”
