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19-02-2026
GAZA STRIP: The smell hits you before you even see the tents. In the al-Taawun camp, wedged between Yarmouk Stadium and al-Sahaba Street in central Gaza City, the line between human habitation and human waste has been erased.
Forced to flee their homes by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, 765 families have set up makeshift shelters directly on top of and adjacent to an enormous solid waste dump. Here, amid mountains of rotting garbage, they are fighting a losing battle against disease, pests and the psychological horror of living in filth.
Fayez al-Jadi, a father who has been displaced 12 times since the war began, said the conditions are stripping them of their humanity.
“The rats eat the tents from underneath,” al-Jadi told Al Jazeera. “They walk on our faces while we sleep. My daughter is 18 months old. A rat ran right over her face. Every day, she has gastroenteritis, vomiting, diarrhoea or malnutrition.”
Al-Jadi’s plea is not for a luxury accommodation, just a mere 40 to 50 metres (130ft to 164ft) of clean space to live in, he said. “We want to live like human beings.”
‘We wake up screaming’
The sanitary crisis has unleashed a plague of skin infections among the 4,000 residents of the camp. With no running water or sewage system, scabies has spread like wildfire.
Fares Jamal Sobh, a six-month-old infant, spends his nights crying. His mother points to the red, angry rashes covering his small body.
“He doesn’t sleep at night because of the itching,” she said. “We wake up to find cockroaches and mosquitoes on him. We bring medicine, but it’s useless because we are living on trash.”
Um Hamza, a grandmother caring for a large extended family, including a blind husband and a son suffering from asthma, said shame is no longer compounding their suffering.
“We’ve stopped being ashamed to say my daughter is covered in scabies,” she told Al Jazeera. “We’ve used five or six bottles of ointment, but it’s in vain.”
She added that the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system has left them with nowhere to turn. “The hospitals, like al-Ahli, have started turning us away. … They write us a prescription and tell us to go buy it, but there is no medicine to buy.”
The conditions at al-Taawun are a microcosm of a citywide collapse. Hamada Abu Laila, a university lecturer who helps administer the camp, warned of an “environmental catastrophe” exacerbated by the lack of sewage networks and drinking water across Gaza City but the problem goes deeper than a lack of aid. According to Husni Muhanna, spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, the crisis is man-made. Israeli forces have blocked access to the Gaza Strip’s main landfill in the east, forcing the creation of hazardous temporary dumps in populated areas like Yarmouk and the historic Firas Market.
“More than 350,000 tons of solid waste are piling up inside Gaza City alone,” Muhanna told Al Jazeera in January.
He explained that the municipality is paralyzed by a “complex set of obstacles”, including the destruction of machinery, severe fuel shortages and constant security risks. With interventions limited to primitive means, the municipality can no longer manage waste in accordance with health standards, leaving thousands of displaced families to sleep atop a toxic time bomb.
Sleeping next to a tank shell
The dangers in al-Taawun are not just biological. Rizq Abu Laila, displaced from the town of Beit Lahiya in the north, lives with his family next to an unexploded tank shell that lies among the rubbish bags and plastic sheets. (Al Jazeera)
