Gaza – As soon as the sun’s rays rise in the sky, marking the beginning of the afternoon, Ismail Ghoneim hurries to leave his tent and steps towards the mosque near the shelter camp, where he lives in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, to escape the intense heat.
Ghoneim (71 years old) fears the impact of the extreme heat on his health, especially since he suffers from high blood pressure. He says that secluding himself in the mosque throughout the day is his only option given that he does not have any means to reduce the heat.
However, Ghoneim suffers from several herniated discs in his back, which prevents him from going to the mosque every day, so he is sometimes forced to stay in the tent and use a plastic plate as a hand fan to cool down the atmosphere a little.
Oven tents
With the end of winter and the beginning of spring, the scorching rays of the sun turn the tents of the displaced into greenhouses that trap the heat inside, making them resemble ovens during the daylight hours.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians fear the effects of the extreme heat inside the tents on their health, and therefore many of them leave them during the day due to their inability to provide the necessary solutions to cool them. Ghoneim told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “If I stay in the tent, I fear for myself because of the intense heat.”
The heat brings another problem: flies and insects that spread inside the tents in large numbers, turning the lives of their residents into hell. Ghoneim says that flies are active when the temperature rises during the afternoon until sunset, and he adds that they are very harmful, but they are forced to coexist with them.
Two weeks ago, volunteers carried out an initiative to spray the tents of the displaced with an insecticide to eliminate the flies, but they “came back again,” according to Ghoneim.
Abeer Abu Eid finds no escape from the intense heat and flies in her tent except to resort to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the city of Deir Al-Balah, where she spends her day in shaded places until the sun’s rays disappear and evening begins. She points out, while she lives in the tent with 11 people, including her husband, children, and grandchildren, that the extreme heat has had a bad effect on her psychological state.
She told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “Since the morning, I cannot stand myself or my children because of the heat. I do not have the mood to talk to my children. By God, I cannot. There is no energy. I scream (crying) for no reason from oppression.” Flies also add to her great suffering, as they deprive her of sleep, as she wakes up every day with their bites. She is also unable to take her nap at noon for the same reason, according to her description.
fleeing
Abeer confirms, “I feel that everything in the tent is unclean because of the flies. Life is very, very difficult. May God be kind to us. Summer has not yet arrived. What will it be like during it?”
She fears for her children from the stings of heat, and explains that she looks at them as they toss and turn from its intensity, and feels that they will explode from it, and that she fears death for them, “God forbid, because there is no cooling device, no fan or anything.”
She stated that her two children, Hamza (7 years old) and Fayza (8 years old), developed skin rashes, redness, and very small pimples due to the intense heat, which prompted their father to take them to bathe in sea water, as residents believe that its salty water treats many skin diseases.
In the shade of her neighbour’s tent, Souad Al-Mamlouk was taking shelter from the intense heat and flies after she fled from her neighboring residence, which she described as an oven. She explained to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that she fled from the tent to this part of the shade because she cannot stay in the tent, and that she stays on the run all day and returns at night.
The harsh conditions that Souad, who was displaced from the Shujaiya neighborhood in Gaza City, has been living in for about 7 months, have caused her psychological condition to deteriorate, as the high blood pressure she suffers from has caused damage to her eye, which hurts and does not respond to treatment, as she says. The difficult psychological state was transmitted to her family members, who, according to Souad, became nervous and could not tolerate each other.
Death and injuries
Doctor Muhammad Rayan, head of the emergency and reception department at Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah, reveals that the extreme heat inside the tents causes many injuries and deaths.
He pointed out, in an interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net, that the hospital’s emergency department receives casualties daily due to high temperatures inside the tents, and it also receives deaths from time to time. He stated that he does not currently have an accurate statistic on the number of deaths due to complications from living inside tents and high temperatures, and he expects the statistic to be issued soon.
According to Rayan, those most affected are the elderly, those with chronic diseases, cancer and anemia patients, children, and those with respiratory diseases.
He also pointed out that the problem of high temperatures inside tents is complex, as it is linked to the spread of flies and insects to a very large extent because they prefer a hot environment, which causes an increase in diseases, and may cause the spread of epidemics, especially with the large population overcrowding inside the shelter centers.
The head of the emergency and reception department at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital confirms that high temperatures are dangerous and may cause death, as they received a death case of a girl on April 25, due to her exposure to sunstroke after the occupation army forced her to walk a long distance.
Tents were set up during the past fall and winter to shelter hundreds of thousands of displaced people who were forced by Israel to move from their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, or whose homes were demolished.
There do not appear to be any solutions on the horizon to replace tents with housing capable of protecting the displaced from the high temperatures. On the contrary, observers fear that the problem will worsen if Israel decides to invade the city of Rafah, which has more than a million people, where it plans to displace its residents and push them to reside in large shelter centers consisting of tents.
Doctor Rayan concludes his speech by saying that these tents are “unfit for human living, and unfortunately there are currently no solutions to confront the problem of heat inside them.”