Gaza families living among garbage dumps as hundreds of thousands forced to flee

Families in Gaza are being forced to live amongst garbage dumps after forced displacement from Israel. The Zionist regime have carried out attack after attack on residential areas, and people are left with nowhere else to go. Dozens of families, after a long displacement from the Al-Jalaa neighborhood through Al-Mawasi and Khan Yunis, were forced to set up temporary tents and live next to garbage dumps in the Al-Nuwairi area west of the Nuseirat camp in the southern Gaza Strip.

Adel Dalloul, whose family had to settle in a tent camp near Nuseirat said:

Flies are in our food.

If you try to sleep, flies, insects and cockroaches are all over you.

Gaza families forced to live amongst garbage

The forced evacuation orders issued by the occupation forces to citizens in the Gaza and northern Gaza territories required them to head to the Khan Yunis and central governorates. However, these areas are already overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. The overcrowded camps will only become more so.

These conditions reflect the occupation’s clear policy of forcibly displacing the population, targeting their homes and property with shelling, depriving civilians of the basic necessities of life and increasing their daily suffering.

Living in these difficult conditions exposes civilians to significant health risks, including the spread of skin diseases, rodents, and insects, as well as foul odors and a lack of health care and medicine. Local data confirms that the areas designated for shelter in the southern Gaza Strip do not provide even a basic standard of living.

In 2024, PBS reported:

The U.N. estimates nearly 70% of Gaza’s water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged by Israel’s heavy bombardment. That includes all five of the territory’s wastewater treatment facilities, plus water desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs.

The employees who once managed municipal water and waste systems have been displaced, and some killed, officials say.

Whatever infrastructure existed to address such problems has been thoroughly destroyed by Israel. Such a policy is only further evidence of the totality of destruction that Israel is heedlessly headed for.

Featured image via the Canary