GAZA: For months, Safaa Yassin has dressed her child in the same white bodysuit, an all-too-familiar tale in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by 10 months of war. “When I was pregnant, I dreamed of dressing my daughter in beautiful clothes. Today, I have nothing to put on her,” says Yassin, one of thousands of Palestinians displaced from Gaza City.
“I never thought that one day I wouldn’t be able to dress my children,” says the 38-year-old, now living in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area designated as a humanitarian zone by Zionist forces. “But the few clothes I found before evacuating to the south were either the wrong size or not suitable for the season,” she adds, as Gaza bakes in summertime temperatures of 30-plus degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) every day. Finding clothing — any clothing — has become increasingly difficult for the 2.
4 million people living in the territory besieged by the Zionist entity. Gaza once had a thriving textiles industry but since Hamas’s attack on the Zionist entity on October 7, 2023, it has received just a trickle of goods. Faten Juda also struggles to dress her 15-month-old son, Adam, who is squeezed into ill-fitting pajamas, his bare arms and legs sticking out from the tight fabric.
“He’s growing every day and his clothes don’t fit him anymore, but I can’t find any others,” the 30-year-old tells AFP. Same headscarf Children are not the only ones suffering from the lack of clothing in the Gaza Strip, which count.