It took the combined effort of five men to corner and kill the large rodent that invaded Malek Shinbary’s tent in Gaza, terrifying his five-year-old daughter.
“It was a big weasel, the size of a rabbit,” said Shinbary, a Palestinian writer living with his wife and two small children in a tent in Al-Mawasi, an overcrowded encampment with no utilities hosting hundreds of thousands of displaced people on the coast in southern Gaza.
“These big rodents have been feeding on bodies under the rubble and their numbers have multiplied,” said Shinbary. “They come into the tent and chew on our clothes. Every day we have to throw something out.”
Rodents and insects are the latest scourge to hit Palestinians struggling to survive in devastated Gaza, where sewage flows between tents, rubbish piles up, and clean water is in short supply. Rats and weasels chew their way into tents, biting children and contaminating food, families say.
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“Every day we take all the bedding and clothes out of the tent to be exposed to the sun, but still there are bedbugs at night,” said Shinbary. He said sticky tape could be bought to catch mice, but was too expensive at about $3.50 (€3) a strip. “You need five or six every day,” he said.
Lice, fleas and mosquitoes are also spreading in the vast camps filled with Gaza’s displaced people, transmitting disease and causing skin infections, according to a UN survey in April.
The spread of pests comes eight months into a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. There has been no reconstruction since then, after most of the strip’s built environment was bombed into ruins. Roughly two million Gazans are crammed into an ever-shrinking patch of land after Israel claimed control over 60 per cent of the narrow strip.
Rodents were becoming “a huge, huge problem because of accumulated rubble everywhere”, said Salim Oweis, a Unicef spokesman who saw 10 cases of children with rodent bites on a visit to Gaza this month.
“Machinery [to move rubble] is not allowed in, and another problem is the space left in Gaza. It’s really hard to find a place to move the rubble to. It has created the perfect environment for rodents to multiply,” he said.
Wounds from rodent and insect bites, he said, “get inflamed and contaminated easily” because of shortages of clean water and hygiene products.
More than 80 per cent of Gazans live in tents, with the rest huddled in mainly ruined homes. Aid officials say restrictions placed by Israel – which controls the flow of goods into Gaza – on many items needed to repair the enclave’s shredded infrastructure mean there has been little improvement to the horrific conditions residents endure. Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu last month ordered the military to seize still more territory.
Within Gaza, rubbish dumps are close to tents in displacement sites, creating health hazards that will increase as summer temperatures rise, said humanitarian officials and residents.
OCHA, the UN agency that co-ordinates relief efforts in Gaza, has recently called for restored access to landfills near the perimeter, where Israeli forces remain deployed. It also wants Israel to allow the entry of debris removal machinery and equipment such as trucks, rubbish compactors and loaders.
There is little prospect of change, however, after progress stalled in efforts to forge a lasting agreement following the ceasefire deal that partially halted Israel’s two-year military offensive against Hamas, which was triggered by the militant group’s October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel.
Hamas has refused to relinquish its weapons, a key condition for any rebuilding. The truce ended the worst of the fighting, but Israel has continued to strike, killing 960 people – including more than 120 children – since the ceasefire, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Rodent and insect infestations have been fuelled by the collapse of multiple life-sustaining systems in Gaza, including water, sanitation, nutrition and healthcare, said Sally Saleh, a doctor who heads the emergency response for Medical Aid for Palestinians, a UK charity.
“It is a complicated problem, but the management methods we have are very minimal,” she said. “The main solution is to enhance the sanitation system, which has already collapsed. Another solution is to facilitate the entry of pesticides, but there are a lot of barriers.”
Cogat, the Israeli body overseeing aid access to Gaza, said that at the request of the UN and other international organisations, “nearly 170 tonnes of pesticides and thousands of traps for rats, mosquitoes, and other pests have been brought into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks”.
OCHA said in May that 80 per cent of sewage pumping stations in Gaza had ceased functioning, leaving about 40,000 cubic metres of untreated sewage to flow into the sea each day, and to flood areas where families are staying.
It said overall water production in Gaza had dropped by about 20 per cent in May from two months earlier, largely due to shortages of chemicals and spare parts. It called for the “sustained entry” of spare parts, pumps, pipes, engine oils and water treatment chemicals.
Israel has allowed mousetraps into Gaza, while UN agencies have been able to bring in pesticides, but that has not been enough, said Oweis. “Unfortunately, the amount that is allowed in now is barely enough for a few weeks, and of course, we’re talking about the whole of Gaza that is affected.”
Cogat said “essential infrastructure” including wells and water facilities was being repaired. It said it was working with the UN and international community to “support sanitation efforts and the maintenance of critical infrastructure”, including allowing in waste removal trucks and equipment for repairing infrastructure.
In Jabalia – once a bustling township north of Gaza City – Omran Abu Warda lives with his wife and five children in a tattered tent. It has been worn out, he said, by the family’s multiple displacements, and torn by rodents’ sharp teeth.
Despite people’s attempts to clean, he said, dirt and rubbish remained everywhere, along with an “abnormal” number of mosquitoes. There are no toilets in the camp, which he estimates houses up to 15,000 people, so residents are forced to dig holes in the ground to use as latrines.
“There is no sewage system and no way to discharge sewage water,” he said. “When a latrine gets full we mix up the contents with sand and dig another one. All the destruction around us and the sewage attracts the rodents.
“We joke that they have become our children and live with us. We try to laugh at it because of how much we suffer.”
Abu Warda, who sells household items at a stall, said much of his day is spent queuing for clean water and food. “After you finish the worries of the day, you start becoming anxious about the night, which brings rats and weasels and threatens the safety of the children.”
Gazans, who are almost all reliant on food aid, have been left “holding on by a thread”, said Oweis.
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Shinbary, who is desperate to leave Gaza, said he believed the degradation of living conditions was an Israeli tactic. He compared it with what he called the “intentional starvation” of 2025, when Israel blocked all humanitarian aid including food for 11 weeks, then allowed a trickle back in under severe restrictions that led to a famine in Gaza’s north.
Cogat said such accusations were “biased claims promoted by interested parties seeking to create a false impression of a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip as part of an effort to discredit Israel”.
But Shinbary said: “They are keeping us on the edge of collapse and on the edge of starvation ... I see no horizon at all, or hope to count on. It makes me despair.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
