A steady stream of miserable children and worried parents flowed into the dermatology office at Nasser Hospital in central Gaza . A toddler with a blue hair bow sobbed as her mother showed how the red and white spots covering her face have spread to her neck and chest. Another woman lifted her little boy’s clothes to reveal the rashes on his back, butt, thighs and stomach.
On his wrists, he had open sores from scratching. A father stood his daughter on the desk so the doctor could examine the lesions on her calves. Causes of skin diseases in Gaza's tent camps Skin diseases are running rampant in Gaza, health officials say.
The cause, they say, is the appalling conditions in overcrowded tent camps housing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes, along with the summer heat and the collapse of sanitation that has left pools of open sewage amid 10 months of Israel’s bombardment and offensives in the territory. Doctors are wrestling with more than 103,000 cases of lice and scabies and 65,000 cases of skin rashes, according to the World Health Organization. In Gaza’s population of some 2.
3 million, more than 1 million cases of acute respiratory infections have been recorded since the war began, along with more than half a million of acute diarrhea and more than 100,000 cases of jaundice, according to the United Nations Development Program. Cleanliness is impossible in the ramshackle tents, basically wood frames hung with blankets or plastic sheets, cramm.