Tents that were meant to offer Palestinians a measure of safety in Gaza are now teeming with a different threat: rats. In a dispatch for the CBC, reporter Yasmine Hassan details how displaced families living in camps like those in Gaza City's Yarmouk stadium—set up amid rubble and beside mounds of trash—describe rats running over them as they sleep, biting adults and children and triggering infections and rashes. Save the Children calls it a "plague of rats," and warns the situation is likely to only get worse as summer temps arrive.
Health officials say Gaza's shattered waste and sewage systems have created ideal conditions not just for rodents, but for scabies, lice, bedbugs, and other parasites; the BBC reports urban weasels are also an issue. A local WHO rep calls the creatures "the predictable consequence of a collapsed living environment," and the UN in April said 81% of 1,644 assessed displacement sites reported "frequently visible" rodents or pests.
Israeli officials say they've recently allowed in roughly 90 tons of pest-control chemicals and 1,000 mousetraps, but aid groups tell the CBC that traps are largely useless in the debris. Humanitarian workers tell the BBC they need more machinery and parts in order to tackle the trash heaps, and are also seeking access to key landfill sites that sit in eastern parts of the Gaza Strip controlled by the Israeli military. One 39-year-old mother says her children are afraid to sleep, and a 48-year-old living in the stadium camp elaborates on that sleeping fear, saying he woke up drenched in blood from a rat bite to the leg.
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