Deir el-Balah, Gaza – It is around 7:30 p.m. and the sun is setting when Nimah Elyan and her four youngest children return home – a beige tent in a temporary camp in Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza – after trying to escape the heat by going to the beach.
“In summer, the tent is hell,” says Nimah, 45, using a sponge and a bucket of water to wash her children under seven. “We can’t stay inside the tent for even five minutes a day. The heat is absolutely unbearable.”
To escape the stifling heat of the day, Nimah takes her children swimming in the sea, a few kilometers away.
Her children look sleepy as they remove their clothes, their skin reddened from the day spent outside. Nimah’s four-year-old daughter sits on the ground eating beans, leftover from last night’s dinner.
“My children cry all day because of the heat,” she says, explaining that their skin suffers from constant exposure to the sun, lack of hygiene products and lack of water. The water they use for washing and drinking is collected by her children from the nearby hospital.
“Every day around 11am, when the weather becomes unbearable, we take a donkey cart to go to the sea,” says Nimah.
Going to the sea is not easy, but Nimah says the heat leaves her no choice. But when the Israelis attack, they are forced to stay in the camp and in their heated tent.
The family has to pay about 20 shekels ($5) to make the 40-minute ride by donkey cart to the beach. They often have to wait in the sun for transportation. Sometimes transportation never arrives and they have to walk to the beach.
Once there, Nimah sits on the sand and watches her children. Sometimes she joins them in the water.
And when they return home in the evening, Nimah washes her children’s bodies to remove the salt and then tries to feed them with what she can find. “The living conditions are very difficult. Because of this daily journey, we lack the food distributed daily by the community kitchen, which makes the food supply difficult,” she explains.
Some days they stay at the camp to collect food from the community kitchen which distributes free meals or food aid packages.
“They ravaged the bodies of our children”
In early March, Nimah moved from the Nassr neighborhood in northern Gaza City to Deir el-Balah, fleeing what UN experts say is a famine spreading across Gaza. Her husband and two older sons were determined not to leave their home and remained in the north.
“I endured dangerous conditions and bombings for about five months, but we eventually escaped extreme starvation,” said the mother of nine.
“We are now facing the war of displacement in tents and a summer that has ravaged the bodies of our children,” adds Nimah, pointing to her one-year-old granddaughter whose body is partially covered in rashes.
The baby’s mother, Nimah’s 21-year-old daughter Nahla, lives in a nearby camp and was in her mother’s tent after going to the beach with her mother and siblings.
“I live in a nylon tent with my husband, my daughter and my husband’s family of eight,” she says, holding her baby in her arms. They spend most of their days walking around trying to find a shady spot, she adds.
“My daughter has a bacterial rash that has spread all over her body, and medical ointments have not helped,” Nahla says. She went to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in Deir el-Balah, where “doctors said the situation was getting worse due to the extreme heat and advised cooling her down with water, which is scarce.”
Nahla says many children in the camp suffer from similar rashes due to the unsanitary conditions, lack of water and heat.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 150,000 people in the enclave have contracted skin diseases due to the unsanitary conditions Palestinians have been forced to live in since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza on October 7. As of July 29, the WHO has recorded 65,368 cases of rashes, 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, and 11,214 cases of chickenpox since the start of the war.
“I feel sad for our children, but there is no help,” Nimah said as she washed her six-year-old daughter. “We have been forgotten.”
“We are burning alive”
Heba Sheikh Khalil, a 38-year-old mother of eight, sits in a small shaded area in front of her tent with her family, fanning herself with a piece of cardboard.
“My face is two-tone, as you can see. The burned part sums up all our suffering,” Heba tells Tel Aviv Tribune, lifting her veil to show the contrast with her exposed, reddened skin.
“We are burning alive,” she said angrily. “The intense heat inside the tent is indescribable.”
Coping with the heat, which is at its worst between six in the morning and six in the evening, is a daily struggle for residents of the camp where they live, Heba said.
“The sun’s rays are vertical during the day,” she explains. “My children and I spend the day looking for shade or walking the streets, hoping for a cool breeze, but we find none.”
Heba’s family was displaced from the Shujayea neighborhood in eastern Gaza City in October and moved to Deir el-Balah and then to Nuseirat refugee camp.
Her house consisted of a long living room and five large rooms. “The air played tricks on her,” she says, recalling the cool breeze that blew through her now-destroyed house.
“I now live in a tent. We are eaten by flies and insects. There is no water, so my children shower at the nearby Al-Aqsa hospital,” she said, adding that her family showers every ten days.
Heba’s suffering goes beyond the discomfort of the scorching weather, to heatstroke, headaches, dizziness and the bites of mosquitoes and flies that have proliferated in the harsh conditions.
“The environment in the tents is very miserable. There is no infrastructure or sewage system, which encourages the proliferation of insects,” she explains.
Sanitary conditions in makeshift camps have worsened due to piles of waste and accumulation of sewage, risking the spread of infectious diseases, UN agencies warn.
Meanwhile, the WHO announced it would send one million polio vaccines to Gaza after the poliovirus was found in sewage samples.
“The suffering is multifaceted: extreme heat, waste, sewage, lack of drinking water and detergents, the prices of which have increased considerably,” explains Heba.
“We live in hell on earth. Every day I wake up hoping that this is just a bad dream that will end.”
