RAFAH — Ahlam, seven months pregnant, could not stand in a queue for more than half an hour to take her turn to use the bathroom. She told her husband to do something.
Rushing to the front of the queue, he offered to pay five shekels to a woman near the front of a long line waiting for her turn to use the school bathrooms.
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The woman accepted and gave her place to Ahlam, who took her turn only to find that the bathroom’s water supply was out. Her husband rushed to bring her a water container.
“I suffer a lot, standing in line while I’m nearly at the end of my term and trying to carry the gallon container of water into the bathroom,” says Ahlam. She says she ends up needing to spend a long time inside and the women outside get angry as they wait for her to finish.
This is the just one of the countless women displaced from the northern Gaza Strip. Ahlam used to live in the north until Israel issued evacuation orders, conducted airstrikes, occupied the area with ground forces and decimated once familiar neighborhoods.
Mass displacement
Ahlam — along with hundreds of thousands of others — has now been pushed into Rafah, where infrastructure has also been destroyed and where there is severe overcrowding, there is no electricity and wastewater drainage operations have stopped. As a result, the streets in populated areas are flooded with wastewater.
Speaking to Mada Masr, Rafah mayor Ahmed Al-Sufi says that the Occupation targeted the roads in the city of Rafah and the water and sewage networks. The networks are now out of service, he says, and sewage is now leaking into groundwater instead of draining as it should.
Rafah’s infrastructure was built to accommodate 300,000 people […] and is now being used by over 1,300,000.
Mass displacement over the past weeks is exacerbating this crisis, he says, and the municipality’s ability to respond has diminished.
The Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said that waterborne diseases such as Hepatitis A are spreading as a result.
A basic human need
In these conditions, going to the bathroom, one of the most basic human needs, has become a difficult need to address in the Gaza Strip, where Israel’s war has now waged on for over 100 days. Now, Ahlam is living at a school-turned-shelter in Rafah, south of the strip and near the border with Egypt, where around 1.3 million people are now crowded together seeking safety from the ongoing aggression.
Each shelter has only a small number of bathrooms relative to the number of people in need, so each person gets only a few minutes per day to use the facility. Pregnant women, the sick and the elderly suffer particularly.
Abu Nidal, who is 60 years old and suffers from diabetes, formed a group with some other displaced people and set up a new bathroom for men and another for women in a camp to the west of the city of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Helping to build the two bathrooms cost him a lot of money, says Abu Nidal, even though it’s not fully equipped. They do not contain water drainage channels and there is no sewage system, he says, explaining that they were built on former agricultural land where there is no sewage infrastructure.
There is no adequate sewage infrastructure in general — Rafah’s current infrastructure was built to accommodate its original population of around 300,000 people before the war and is now being used by the over 1,300,000 people in Rafah Governorate now.
Lack of infrastructure
Abu Nidal says that the bathroom he has built instead is essentially a large water barrel that was cut off at the bottom and buried in the ground. Then a small tent was made around it.
Waterborne diseases such as Hepatitis A are spreading as a result of the crisis.
Abu Nidal suffers a lot from his diabetes and needs to go to the bathroom more than once a day, but even with the new toilets, he still has to walk a long distance and wait in line to take his turn, since the displacement camp where he lives houses thousands of displaced families, including his own.
As for Anas, who is in his thirties, he says that he and a neighboring family agreed that Anas’s wife and two children could use their neighbors’ bathroom whenever they had water.
Anas says he can wait in line to get to the bathroom, but his wife and two children cannot. After 8 pm though, they have to ask the family for permission first and if they don’t get it, they face a long uncomfortable wait until the following morning.
