GENEVA: Fuel shortages and worsening sanitation in the Gaza Strip are shaping up to be the perfect storm for tragedy through the spread of disease, the United Nations warned on Tuesday. UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, said there was a serious threat of a mass disease outbreak in the besieged Palestinian territory. “Without enough fuel, we will see the collapse of sanitation services. So we have then, on top of the mortars and the bombs, a perfect storm for the spread of disease. “It’s a perfect storm for tragedy,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder told a press briefing in Geneva.

“We have a desperate lack of water, fecal matter strewn across densely populated settlements, an unacceptable lack of latrines, and severe, severe restraints on hand-washing, personal hygiene and cleaning.” Speaking via video-link from Cairo, Elder said the potential for wider loss of life in Gaza was being significantly exacerbated because an estimated 800,000 children in the enclave are displaced from their homes.

“If children’s access to water and sanitation in Gaza continues to be restricted and insufficient, we will see a tragic yet entirely avoidable surge in the number of children dying,” said Elder. “It’s also important to note it’s starting to rain in Gaza. Now combined, children face a serious threat of mass disease outbreak. This, of course, would be lethal.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded more than 44,000 cases of diarrhea and 70,000 acute respiratory infections, but real numbers may be significantly higher.

“We are hearing about several hundred people per toilet at the UNRWA centers and those have been overflowing, so people are doing open defecation,” Richard Brennan, regional emergency director for the Eastern Mediterranean region at WHO, told Al Jazeera in an interview. “They have to find a place to go to the bathroom in the grounds where they are staying. That’s a huge public health risk and also very humiliating.”

UNICEF is particularly concerned about the risk of a cholera outbreak in the Gaza Strip, fearing an exponential rise in child deaths if an outbreak was to strike. Cholera, which has not so far been detected in Gaza, is contracted from a bacterium that is generally transmitted through contaminated food or water. It causes diarrhea and vomiting and can be especially dangerous for young children.

Stretched beyond capacity

Gaza’s health ministry said Tuesday that hospitals in northern Gaza are now completely out of service. Ashraf al-Qudra, Gaza’s health ministry spokesperson, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the occupancy rate in hospitals in Gaza’s north has reached 190 percent.

The Zionist entity has bombed and destroyed parts of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, where more than 700 people are still held captive under a siege by the Zionist army, according to Qudra. Zionist forces had seized the hospital last week to search for what they said was a Hamas tunnel network and command center built underneath the complex. Hamas has denied the allegations.

Qudra also said that about 120 people were evacuated from northern Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital to Nasser Medical Complex in the south of the Strip. There are still more than 400 injured people inside the Indonesian Hospital, in addition to about 200 medical staff and more than 2,000 others taking refuge, he added. The Zionist army has put those inside the hospital in a “circle of death”, targeting anybody who moves around the hospital or inside it, Qudra said. Gaza’s health ministry had said on Monday that at least 12 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded by attacks on the hospital funded by Jakarta, which is currently surrounded by Zionist tanks.

The WHO says it has recorded 335 attacks on health complexes in the occupied Palestinian territory since Oct 7, the beginning of the Gaza war, including 164 attacks in the Gaza Strip and 171 attacks in the West Bank. These attacks have resulted in forced mass evacuations from hospitals, and multiple fatalities and casualties among patients, their companions, and displaced people taking refuge there, according to the WHO.

At least 13,000 Palestinians – about 5,600 of them children and 3,500 women – have been killed in Gaza since the Zionist entity launched its air and ground assault on Gaza after the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas targeting the Zionist entity, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Hamas and allied groups took about 240 captives during their incursion into the southern parts of the Zionist entity that killed around 1,200 people, according to Zionist authorities. — Agencies