Eleven days ago in Gaza, a heatwave topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit enveloped the Gaza strip, bringing with it even more misery, which piled on to starvation, no potable water, the smells of decomposing bodies buried under tons of rubble with raw sewage seemingly everywhere as conditions continued to deteriorate across the occupied territory.
Health officials worry that the two-day wave of extreme heat for this time of year is an ominous sign of exacerbating epidemics and infectious disease outbreaks. Germs, pollution, and exposure to vectors such as mosquitos create waterborne and airborne diseases.
Well over one million Palestinians are crammed in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Most are housed in makeshift tents and under tarps, exposed to the cold and rain in winter. Summer is coming, and a two-day heatwave is a preview of what is to come, with temperatures predicted to be in the 120 F to 140 F range in the months ahead.
The refugees are starving; there is no anesthesia for treating bombing and sniper victims wounds. Heat domes could be the final blow for hundreds of thousands.
Palestinians are well aware of this; they had lived under conditions such as these long before Hamas terrorists slaughtered over 1200 Israelies and took hundreds of hostages that repulsed the world, launching a retaliation from Israel that brought death from above and slaughter by bullets from Israeli troops on the ground.
Infrastructure became available only when Israel decided to provide electricity, water, and imported food. In 2023, high temperatures caused power failures, and the population had no access to air conditioning. People flocked to the beaches for relief, where the water was so polluted from sewage and chemicals that it threatened intestinal disease for swimmers.
NPR wrote about the heatwave two weeks ago:
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — For two sweltering days this week, as temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Mohammad Ayash's tent had become unbearable — so hot, he said, it was like "hell fire."
"Red-hot death. It's killing us," he said.
Like thousands of Palestinians, Ayash and his family have lived for months in a modest, hand-built tent after leaving their home to flee from Israel's seven-month military campaign.
But the tent Ayash erected — a modest triangle built against a cinder block wall, its outer walls made of blankets and cloth — was meant for the cold, rainy nights of a Gaza winter, he said. To keep him and his family dry, he had lined the tent walls with plastic, the sheets held in place by wooden boards nailed together.
In this week's heat, he said, wiping the sweat from his brow, it was even hotter inside the tent than outside. "The kids are falling apart. They can't stay inside the tents," he said. "We want to remove the nylon from it, God willing."
By Friday, the two-day heat wave had broken, and temperatures had returned to the 70s. But for Palestinians and aid workers alike, the high heat served as a preview of a summer to come — during which the punishing heat will weigh daily on every facet of what has become normal life in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Nowhere is hotter in Gaza than Rafah at the edge of the Saharan desert. It is the southernmost city on the strip, now packed with hundreds of thousands of refugees ordered there as it was a safe zone designated by the IDF. But, like climate change, no place will be safe for long.
It is not just refugees who have nothing but the clothes on their backs. Aid workers suffer and die as well.
"We don't know what to do with our families, with our children. We don't know how to face this heat; we are terrified." HaithamFifty percent of chronic disease medications are unavailable in Gaza as they require refrigeration, which no longer exists.
“This hot weather is a challenge for us,” said Mohammed Fayyad, a displaced pharmacist who started selling medications from a tent he built out of wooden slabs, curtains and metal scraps at a camp for displaced people in Al-Mawasi.
With no electricity or alternative sources of power, Mr. Fayyad, 32, said that he could not keep the medicines — which he buys from pharmacies that have had to shut down — stored at cool enough temperatures to keep them from being damaged.
“Fifty percent of the medicines for chronic diseases are not available because we do not have any source of power to keep them cool,” said Mr. Fayyad, speaking from his makeshift pharmacy that he named after his 3-year-old daughter Julia.
Mr. Fayyad is trying to find ways to generate power for a refrigerator to store medication.
“I hope I can find those solar panels, which are very expensive, to make the options wider for the displaced people,” he said.
Democracy Now writes on the effects of Climate change from Netanyahu’s war:
Israel’s military assault on Gaza is not just a humanitarian disaster but also generating massive amounts of planet-heating emissions and exacerbating the climate crisis. The carbon emissions from Israel’s bombs, tanks, fighter jets and other military activity in the first two months of the war were higher than the annual carbon footprints of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, according to researchers in the United States and United Kingdom. That is “a really conservative estimate,” says Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani, who reported on the new study. We also speak with Hadeel Ikhmais, head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, who says the climate impacts of the war are in keeping with Israel’s destruction of Palestinian land, water and other natural resources over many decades.
Interview by Amy Goodman
HADEEL IKHMAIS: Yeah, this is true. And this is very — we’ve been working through the last 10 years on finding energy security resources and water resources from unconventional ways — for example, wastewater treatment, desalination in Gaza, a lot of renewable energy, solar panels — in order to find other resources to Palestinians in Gaza. But with all these — and they are in different shapes. For example, there are big projects, small projects, some entrepreneurship, some small projects for small villages or neighborhoods.
All of these, or basically most of them, were being destructed from the airstrikes and from the war and the last bombardments, among them one big project from the world-funded — from the World Bank and also from the Ministry of Finance in Palestine. Most of these solar panels were destructed. And also, we have another project with the Green Climate Fund, which is the financial arm to the UNFCCC, which is called the water banking, in north Gaza. Also, we don’t know how is the exact damage of this facility, because there is a lack of communication between the technical team in West Bank and Gaza because of the war under, because technical persons and colleagues are under war. So we don’t know how much is the real damage to these facilities. But all the reports from different organizations, from the WHO, from the UNICEF, from a lot of international organizations, show that there are a lot of facilities that have been extremely and mostly damaged because of the airstrikes in different places, regarding to water facilities, water pipelines, energy units, desalination units, wastewater treatment plants, treatment units. All of them were basically partially or completely destructed by the airstrikes.
And all of these things make it very challenging against combating climate change, because we need those infrastructure to be able to have this adaptive capacity, to have water from unconventional resources, energy security, also the health sector that’s been targeted by targeting the hospitals and all the main facilities for treatment, which —
Despite requirements by the US before any invasion of Rafah that the 1.3 million people in Rafah be relocated to safe zones with housing, water, water, and hospitals available, Netanyahu said FU to the Biden Administration and launched an invasion with none of those steps implemented. All of these deaths and looming mass mortality events will unfold under Biden’s watch, with our tax dollars paying for it just in time for the political conventions and the US elections.
If anyone wants to know what climate change will mean for vulnerable worldwide populations, take a look at Gaza. It will tell you everything you need to know: what a collapsing world will look like and what lack of mercy will show as resources dwindle.
Daily Kos does not want stories such as this on the site. Just look at the front page; do you see any climate or Gazan stories? War or death is not the issue, as Ukraine has wall-to-wall coverage. I am already unable to recommend comments, and if I am bojo’d by what I assume are community members dishing out their version of justice with condescending insults to many folks here they disagree with on climate and genocide, just know it’s been fun, and I tried; my conscience is clear.
There is a reason that Al Jazeera was banned from Gaza, and Tic Toc was banned in the United States.