For months, Safaa Yassin has dressed her child in the same white bodysuit, an all-too-familiar tale in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by 10 months of war.
“When I was pregnant, I dreamed of dressing my daughter in beautiful clothes. Today, I have nothing to put on her,” said Yassin, one of thousands of Palestinians displaced from Gaza City.
“I never thought that one day I wouldn’t be able to dress my children,” said the 38-year-old, now living in Al Mawasi, a coastal area designated as a humanitarian zone by Israeli forces.
“But the few clothes I found before evacuating to the south were either the wrong size or not suitable for the season,” she added, as Gaza bakes in summertime temperatures of 30-plus degrees Celsius every day.
Finding clothing — any clothing — has become increasingly difficult for the 2.4 million people living in the territory besieged by Israel.
Gaza once had a thriving textiles industry but since the war began on Oct.7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel, it has received just a trickle of goods.
Faten Juda also struggles to dress her 15-month-old son, Adam, who is squeezed into ill-fitting pyjamas, his bare arms and legs sticking out from the tight fabric.
“He’s growing every day and his clothes don’t fit him anymore, but I can’t find any others,” the 30-year-old told reporters.
Children are not the only ones suffering from the lack of clothing in the Gaza Strip, which counted 900 textile factories in the industry’s heyday in the early 1990s.
The sector employed 35,000 people and sent four million items to Israel every month. But those numbers have plummeted since 2007, when Hamas took power and Israel blockaded Gaza.
In recent years, Gaza’s workshops had dwindled to about 100, employing about 4,000 people and shipping about 30,000-40,000 items a month to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
By January, three months into the war, the World Bank estimated that 79 per cent of Gaza’s private sector establishments had been partially or totally destroyed.
Even the factories that are still standing have ground to a halt, after months without electricity in Gaza. Any fuel that arrives for generators is mainly used for hospitals and United Nations facilities such as warehouses and aid-supply points.
In these conditions, finding new clothes is a rare event.
“Some women have been wearing the same headscarf for the past 10 months,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, posted on X.
Wearing the same clothes all the time is not just unpleasant, it is a health hazard. With limited water to wash them, disease-spreading lice abound.
Ahmed Al Masri, 29, left his home in the north of Gaza at the start of the war.
Today in Khan Yunis, in the south, he said he does not have any spare shoes or clothes.
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