Gazans left without showers, running water

AFP reports on Gazan Feriel al-Zaaneen, who hasn’t had a shower in more than a month. Like thousands of Palestinians, she doesn’t have enough water to wash, adding to the miseries of life in war-battered Gaza.

In searing summer heat, where temperatures can reach 34 degrees Celsius, (93 Fahrenheit), Feriel is one of more than 218,000 refugees sheltering in 87 UN-run schools from a conflict that has killed at least 1,980 Palestinians, according to Hamas-run Gaza health ministry statistics, and 67 on the Israeli side since July 8.

“There’s no water here and the toilets are very dirty, this is no kind of life,” she says.

Zaaneen, her children and grandchildren, some 50 people, had fled the Israeli bombardment of their neighborhood.

She says she faces a daily struggle to get water, a precious resource in the Hamas-controlled enclave which has been under blockade since Hamas rose to power in 2006.

The UN says that 365,000 Palestinians are still displaced in Gaza, like 37-year-old Faten al-Masri, who has to wash her children with bottles of drinking water.

As she sprinkles cold water on her two-year-old daughter, the toddler screams, her skin covered in angry red blotches.

“All my children got sick here because of the dirt and the lack of hygiene, they’ve all got skin infections and scabs,” Faten says.

“There is no water in the bathrooms, and they were so dirty that we couldn’t even go inside,” she said.

“I have been bathing my sons every three days here in the classroom with bottles of water.”