Health & Healing
WHO records 48,000 diarrhoea cases in Gaza before the winter rains
Image credit: Flooded tents in Deir al-Balah, January 2025 — Ashraf Amra / UNRWA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) · License
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Cases of acute diarrhoea in Gaza have almost doubled since March, from about 27,000 to more than 48,000, the World Health Organization's representative in the Palestinian territories, Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, told reporters in Geneva from Gaza on Tuesday. The winter rains are weeks away, and she said there is still time to keep the next wave small.
The cause is in the water. WHO tested about 6,700 water samples in the first eight months of 2026 and found that microbiological contamination had almost tripled, from under 6 percent of samples in January to more than 18 percent in August, Van de Weerdt said, in remarks reported by Agence France-Presse and Al Jazeera.
Whilst we fail to provide people with the minimum quantities of water, water quality and water contamination remains a major issue.
Reinhilde Van de Weerdt, WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territory, 1 September 2026
Flooding from the rains will send "the sewage, the waste and contaminated water into the places where people sleep, cook and care for their loved ones", she warned. Most of Gaza's people are still displaced in tented sites, and 58 percent of the population faces severe deficiencies in shelter or essential services, the UN humanitarian office OCHA said in its situation report of 28 August.
The water itself is unreliable before it is unsafe. A WASH Cluster survey in early July found 90 percent of households facing frequent, unpredictable disruptions to safe water for drinking, cooking and hygiene, up from 84 percent in June, and 43 percent living within ten metres of sewage or sludge, OCHA reported on 14 August.
What diarrhoea does, and what stops it#
Acute watery diarrhoea kills by dehydration, and it kills the smallest fastest. The treatment is old, cheap and works in a tent: oral rehydration salts dissolved in clean water, given in small sips after every loose stool, with zinc tablets for ten to fourteen days, which WHO and UNICEF recommend for every child under five with diarrhoea.
Where a sachet cannot be found, WHO's household recipe stands in: six level teaspoons of sugar and half a level teaspoon of salt stirred into one litre of clean water. A child should keep drinking it and keep eating, breastfed infants more often than usual.
The signs a parent should not wait on are a child who cannot drink or keep fluids down, sunken eyes, no tears, a dry mouth, very little urine, blood in the stool, or unusual drowsiness. That child needs a clinic with intravenous fluids the same day, and the UNRWA, Palestinian Red Crescent and field-hospital clinics still running in every governorate keep them.
Making the water safe#
Contaminated water is the source, so the response starts before the cup. Water that has been trucked in chlorinated is the safest; where families draw from wells or tanks, a chlorine tablet at the dose printed on its packet, or boiling for one minute where fuel allows, makes it safe, and it must then be kept in a covered container with a tap rather than an open bucket.
Hands carry the rest. Soap and water before eating and after the latrine break the chain, and when soap runs short, WHO's emergency guidance accepts rubbing hands with clean ash and water as a substitute that still removes germs.
That is the household half of the response. The other half is trucked chlorinated water, emptying latrines, and pumping out flooded sites, which are cluster tasks that need pipes, pumps, chlorine and fuel through crossings Israel controls.
Van de Weerdt called for "unimpeded and expedited entry of humanitarian supplies", naming materials for permanent shelter, water and waste management, and the laboratory supplies WHO needs to confirm what is causing disease and answer outbreaks.
The same water, the same year#
Diarrhoea is not the only illness the water is carrying. WHO counted more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasitic infestation, scabies, lice and bed bugs, in the first four months of 2026, and more than 80 percent of displacement sites reported rodents or pests frequently visible, Van de Weerdt said in April.
By 22 May UNRWA put skin infections linked to rodents and parasites at more than 125,000 cases for the year, and said its teams were treating about 400 a day and could treat far more with the medicines it lacked, the Middle East Monitor reported. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric had asked in April for anti-lice shampoo, lotions, hygiene supplies, pesticides and insecticides to be let in.
Doctors Without Borders said in April that Israel was using water access as a weapon in Gaza, citing United Nations, European Union and World Bank data that nearly 90 percent of the territory's water and sanitation infrastructure had been destroyed or damaged, Al Jazeera reported.
The first heavy rains usually reach Gaza in late October. Van de Weerdt insisted a public health disaster can still be prevented, and the arithmetic of her own figures says how: fewer contaminated litres, more chlorine, and a sachet of salts in every tent before the water rises.
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