'Soap has become a luxury item': Aid official describes anguish in Gaza

Former CNN war correspondent Arwa Damon has been to the enclave three times during this war with her charity, Inara, and she says that each trip reveals that there is, quote, less aid and more need. I reached her this week from Daryl Balla on the Gaza coast. Arwa Damon, welcome back to the program from Gaza. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it. Well, last time you were here, after one of your trips, you were in the studio and you said essentially, you know, things just get exponentially worse. I asked you last time how it was. What is it like this time compared to when you were last there? It's a sorrow that is eclipsing any kind of sorrow I've seen before. It's misery beyond the scope of misery. It's less humanitarian assistance, less ability to support those who are in need and an increasingly growing population that extends to just about every single human being in this wretched stretch of land who cannot cope with even the most basic of things. Christiane, we, international aid organizations and local ones have been reduced to trying to advocate for something as simple as a bar of soap. Honestly, it's become a lot. It's terrible to hear you say that. And I know you tweeted that. Just explain what you mean by that and what what difference in life and death would soap make right now? So the bare bones of it is that access to soap and the ability to maintain a certain level of hygiene, reduces the spread of disease by 40%. What we are seeing right now is a significant increase in diseases like hepatitis A. I went down to Nasser Hospital, and the head of the pediatric department there told me that two children a week are dying just in that hospital because of hepatitis A. It also means meningitis is spreading. It also means that this horrific skin disease called impetigo, which is especially prevalent in children and highly contagious and can potentially be lethal because if left untreated, it can lead to kidney failure, which can lead to death is also all over the place. These are all diseases that can be controlled, which in return would empty a bed space in these hospitals to be able to deal with the catastrophic injuries that they're getting from the bomb blasts. But there's no soap. We go into these camps and families are begging us for soap. What are they use instead of soap? Well, one family I spoke to said that they were going down to the beach, getting sand, mixing it with a little bit of salt and lemon. And that's how they've been cleaning themselves for the last five months. So if the cease fire, which we've all been advocating for, to be able to get more humanitarian aid and obviously hasn't materialized for the last ten months, we are now trying to simplify it down to soap. Oh my goodness. I mean, that's really awful to hear you say that. and I just need to say, because there's a report that actually where you are, I think near Deborah. Right. There's the coast. There is apparently showing up all brown and murky because of massive sewage spills. So these people are going there also to try to get clean, but there's not even clean seawater. And Christiane, what people don't realize when they hear about evacuation orders is, yes, we are very familiar with that horrendous image of people just carrying what they can. But each evacuation order impacts organizations ability to distribute and produce safe, clean water. So the most recent evacuation orders over the last two weeks from hand hygiene units reduced the population's access to clean water by 70%. So that has already had an impact on what people are going through. But if we extrapolate beyond that and look at what's happening in the ICUs, I was in the ICU at hospital. There's a 13 year old boy with severe burn injuries. He is in the ICU because he has a blood infection and signs of early sepsis, because there weren't enough bandages to be able to keep his wounds properly clean. There was a little year and a half old girl who is not stabilizing from her catastrophic injuries, because the small piece of plastic called a tracheotomy or something is not available in her size. Now, we were luckily able to secure some for her and deliver them to the hospital. But if this little girl wakes up, Christiane, she's going to wake up and find out that she's an orphan. Oh, no. Oh, this is just so awful. We hear about the huge number of children who have become orphans. We also hear a polio reported for the first time in 25 years in the Gaza Strip. Apparently, a ten month old baby was partially paralyzed. I don't know whether you've been able to hear from the other humanitarians, the U.N., but apparently they're trying to start even in the midst of this war and destruction of a polio vaccine program. Is that possible? Yeah, they have to. And, you know, there is movement in terms of, you know, getting a cold chain in, getting the vaccine in and training of people to be able to deliver the vaccine. The plan is on the table, but the plan, absolutely, 100% cannot be implemented unless there is some sort of a pause in the fighting that is taking place. And if that pause does not happen, and if polio starts to spread, we are going to start seeing and hearing more and more horrific stories of more and more children ending up paralyzed of something that, again, is completely preventable. I do not have the words to begin to describe just how hard it is to provide people with even the most basic of items, because things are not available. I just came back from a fresh vegetable distribution, to a couple of the shelters that that we work with, some of the families, and we purchased this locally, by the way, because aid isn't really moving in, but commercial trucks are. We purchased some of these items at 20 times their original price either. Doesn't matter because these families had not eaten a fresh vegetable for anywhere from five months, and then at best, one month was the last time they had had fresh vegetables. Oh, listen, I mean, is the fighting worse now than it was two, three, four months ago? I mean, the Israelis seem to say they're busy degrading Hamas. They're in these cease fire hostage swap negotiations. and yet, as you say, aid is not getting in. And we can quote also this week, the U.N. said humanitarian efforts ground to a halt because of new Israeli evacuation orders. The International Rescue Committee also had to stop aid during these evacuation orders. It I mean, it's getting worse. The international community says it's trying to get aid in, but you're saying is practically at a trickle. At best, it's less than a trickle. It's like that tiny little drop that barely comes out of the faucet. And we also had to suspend our usual sort of programs and activities for a few days, because two of our staff and five of the shelters that we worked with were under evacuation orders. And I myself have, you know, moved around a couple of times in the last two weeks that that I've been here. The problem we have with aid is the same as what it was two months ago, but significantly worse. We cannot access the aid that Israel permits to enter Kerem Shalom, because the route that Israel designates for us to use to get that aid is basically run by looters and criminal gangs, and Israel is not securing that route, nor is it providing us with alternate routes. There are alternatives that exist. We can use what's known as defense route, where in theory, Israel had at one point stated that it would allow 40 trucks to go through there, mostly trucks carrying medicine and fuel. These days, on a lucky day. And it's not even daily you're getting about 18 trucks moving through there, items that get into the north through eddies right now. So that's soap. I've been talking about those hygiene kits. They actually do get into the northern part of Gaza, but we are not permitted to move them from the north to the south. So we can't even scale up what's being sent through the north. Why they will not give us a straight answer. We do not get straight answers as to why we cannot properly move aid from the South. So, for example, fresh vegetables, because we have them down here, we can buy them and send them to the north. Nor are we allowed to move what gets into the north. Hygiene kits down for the population in the south.