GAZA CITY — Eight-year-old Ruba Saadeh spends her days confined to the tent she shares with her family in Gaza, her body dotted with inflamed red blisters as chickenpox sweeps through overcrowded camps like the one they live in.

Doctors and displaced families in Gaza say the highly contagious disease has surged in recent months as war has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into cramped tent camps with no clean water for hygiene.

“The doctor told us she needs daily cleaning and should be isolated for 20 days,” Ruba’s 19-year-old sister Alaa told AFP. “But how can we isolate her? We all live in one tent.”

UNICEF said health officials had already recorded more than 9,300 suspected cases of chickenpox across Gaza in early July, concentrated mainly in Khan Younis in the south.

“That’s the most densely-populated area in the Gaza Strip… families are sheltering almost on top of each other,” spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told AFP.

Raed Abdel Karim Abu Sariya, a dermatologist with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, said that a lack of space to isolate patients is fueling the spread.

“Chickenpox patients must be isolated because the disease spreads through respiratory infection,” he said.

But in Gaza’s camps, he said, separating the sick from the healthy is virtually impossible.

“Imagine 10, 15 or even 20 people living in a small tent. Where can they isolate a patient?” he said, as he diagnosed a child who had red blisters on his stomach.

AFP footage from Gaza City shows stagnant pools of murky water full of garbage surrounding makeshift shelters, while children walk barefoot between rows of tents.

Outside a Palestinian Red Crescent medical center, patients lined up for treatment as Abu Sariya examined child after child with the telltale rash.

Alaa, Ruba’s sister, blamed the spread of the illness on........

© The Times of Israel