Health risks soaring in Gaza as rainy season nears

Geneva: The approaching rainy season risks worsening a dire public health crisis in Gaza, where most people live in overcrowded tent camps amid rubble and overflowing sewage, the WHO warned Tuesday.

The World Health Organisation warned that there had already been a clear deterioration in the quality of water reaching the population in recent months, while the number of diarrhoea cases had surged.

“Whilst we fail to provide people with the minimum quantities of water, water quality and water contamination remains a major issue,” said Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, the WHO’s representative in the Palestinian territories.

Gaza has been engulfed in a devastating health and humanitarian crisis since Israel launched its war in the territory following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack inside Israel.

Despite a US-backed ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, violence has not halted in the Gaza Strip, and Israel continues to impose significant restrictions on the entry of goods, including medical equipment and fuel.

In April, Doctors Without Borders said that Israel was using water access as a “weapon” in Gaza, pointing to data from the United Nations, European Union and World Bank indicating that Israel had destroyed or damaged nearly 90 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure in the territory.

Israel slammed the report at the time.

Testing of some 6,700 water samples over the first eight months of the year indicated that “microbiological contamination almost tripled”, Van de Weerdt told reporters in Geneva, speaking from the Gaza Strip.

Contamination had gone from under six percent in January to over 18 percent in August, the tests showed.

Van de Weerdt pointed out that lacking laboratory capacities in Gaza meant that those tests could not detect all contaminants likely found in the water and the environment.

It was therefore not surprising, she said, that cases of acute watery diarrhoea had almost doubled since March, jumping from around 27,000 cases to over 48,000 in August.

Van de Weerdt warned that the approaching rainy winter season was likely to deepen the health crisis.

The “vast majority of people in Gaza still live in very overcrowded sites of flimsy tents” surrounded by “metres-high mounds of garbage” and with “overflowing sewage everywhere”, she said.

“Flooding in these very overcrowded places will (send) the sewage, the waste and contaminated water into the places where people sleep, cook and care for their loved ones,” she warned.

At the same time, “the standing water will further allow for breeding grounds for mosquitoes and other pests”, while tents “will be infested with mold”.

Van de Weerdt insisted there was still time to prevent a public health disaster.

She called for “unimpeded and expedited entry of humanitarian supplies”, including materials needed for permanent shelter, sustainable provision of water and waste management.

More laboratory supplies were also needed to help rapidly confirm the causes of disease and better respond to outbreaks, she said.