Muhammad ‘Ubeid

41, a father of five from of a-Shuja’iyah neighborhood in Gaza City, said in a testimony he gave on 13 May 2026:

Before the war, I lived with my wife and our five children, Dima, 15, Baraa, 13, Mira, 10, Bahaa, 6 and Sanad, 2, in a-Shuja’iyah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City.

I studied secretarial work, but since the war began, I haven’t been able to find work. We were displaced from our home on the very first day of the war because we lived near the border, in the eastern part of the neighborhood.

We were displaced about five times within Gaza City, and eventually went south to a-Salam Camp near the Technical College in northern Deir al-Balah.

There are about 150 families in the camp. The number rises and falls depending on the security situation in the Gaza Strip.

There is no basic infrastructure here. We get water for bathing, laundry and dishwashing through channels we dug between the tents. These drainage channels attract insects and mosquitoes, and skin diseases are spreading among the families.

There’s no organized sewage system. Every family dug a pit about two meters deep next to its tent, where wastewater is poured in. The problem is that the pit fills up about once every three months, depending on the size of the family. When that happens, we have to wait for a truck funded by aid organizations to come and pump out the sewage.

But the trucks are often delayed for days because there aren’t enough of them for all the displacement camps. So the sewage overflows and runs through the channels between the tents, causing terrible smells and the spread of many diseases.

The sewage pits and drainage channels have become a breeding ground for rats and mice.

One night, we were asleep in the tent and woke up because my daughter Dima was screaming. At first I thought she’d been shot, but it turned out she woke up terrified after a mouse climbed over her face. That night she couldn’t get back to sleep, she was so afraid the rats would come back.

Even though we try to clean the tent every day, the pests are spreading because we have no closed space to store food like in a kitchen. We keep food, grains and even our clothes in cardboard boxes, and the pests are attracted by the smell of the food. We have often found our clothes or bags with grains and food destroyed by rats.

Another danger is the sewage pits, because most of the families are poor and can’t afford to cover them with metal sheets. One day, my son Sanad was crawling outside the tent and almost fell into a sewage pit, and we grabbed him just in time.

The rodents are also spreading because the tents are on muddy ground and not concrete surfaces, so they dig tunnels underneath and live in them.

The problem is worse in summer, when the rats and mice spread in large numbers throughout the camp. Most of the displaced families can’t afford ordinary solutions such as poison or traps.

For example, a glue trap for rats currently costs 20 shekels [≈ USD 5], and rat poison costs around 50 shekels [≈ USD 13]. As an unemployed father, I cannot afford it. If I have 20 shekels, my priority is to buy food, medicine or other necessities for my children.

Sometimes, aid organizations hold workshops for women about storing food and tent hygiene, but none of that helps reduce the spread of rodents.

In the first months of the war, the number of mice and rats was relatively small. But now, the massive amount of ruined homes has become an ideal environment for them to reproduce.

* Testimony given to B’Tselem field researcher Khaled ‘Azayzeh on 13 May 2026

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