The more than 155 formal shelters run by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) throughout Gaza are finding it difficult to provide water, food, medicine and housing for around 1.7 million displaced people, including over 1.2 million in the south.

Most UNRWA aid is distributed to people in these vastly overcrowded formal shelters, but it still isn’t nearly enough to meet their needs. UNRWA also gives some aid to people outside these shelters, but most people in al-Mawasi haven’t figured out how to get onto the distribution lists.

“My family cannot find any winter clothes or enough blankets,” Barbakh said. “We hear stories of others receiving them among aid items, but we do not know who to ask for such things.”

According to Saleh al-Astal, head of Al-Fajr Palestinian Youth Association, a local nonprofit providing aid in al-Mawasi, some 80,000 displaced families are currently living in the area.

“They have nothing,” al-Astal said. “Many have no shield but the trees in the farming lands; no tents, no nylons, nothing. It’s a miserable situation.”

The lack of clean water is another major challenge for displaced people throughout Gaza, including al-Mawasi. While some local residents and charities are doing what they can to help, most people who have taken shelter in the area are forced to walk long distances and wait in queues to carry back litres of water.

“I prefer the daily arduous journey by foot on an unpaved road compared to the risks of drinking unclean water. My two children were bedridden for days due to contaminated water.”

Momamed al-Aqqad, 34, walks a kilometre every day and waits in line for two hours to finally fill a 40-litre jug from a desalination station belonging to one of the residents of northern al-Mawasi. After their children fell ill from drinking contaminated water, displaced people across al-Mawasi began flocking to the station.

“I prefer the daily arduous journey by foot on an unpaved road compared to the risks of drinking unclean water. My two children were bedridden for days due to contaminated water,” said al-Aqqad, who was displaced with 30 members of his family from northern Khan Younis.

Displaced children in Gaza only have access to an average of 1.5 to 2 litres of water each day, which is below the minimum three litres a day needed for survival, according to UNICEF.

Al-Astal said many people are having to rely on the dirty water flowing through al-Mawasi’s farming lands. “The water used to irrigate crops here is desalinated sewage water, but people are drinking it because they have no other choice,” he said.

Children in al-Mawasi regularly go full days without any food, which is causing malnourishment, according to al-Astal.  Cases of diarrhoea in children have skyrocketed in al-Mawasi and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, according to UNICEF.

“We are experiencing all forms of torture in even the smallest details of our lives,” al-Aqqad said. “Families are waging daily battles to provide less than the minimum for their children, who are starving most days due to scarcity of food or its low quality.”

Conditions throughout Gaza are dire, including in UNRWA shelters in the southern city of Rafah, which is hosting over one million displaced people, according to al-Astal. “What we are receiving from outside of Gaza and what is being distributed is very limited considering the scale of the catastrophe,” he said.

But people in al-Mawasi face particular challenges, he added.

“They are spread among the sand dunes, farms, and streets, and face shortages in the most basic necessities for human life. They are deprived of a lot of the aid that others receive in shelter centres and inner displacement areas in Rafah, taking into consideration the absence of civil society organisations in al-Mawasi,” he said.

Al-Astal said international and regional aid organisations need to increase food deliveries into Gaza in collaboration with local civil society entities that can facilitate distribution among the displaced to stave off disaster.

“We also need increased funding to support water desalination stations and solar-powered water reservoirs, community kitchens, fresh produce, and medicines in displacement areas,” he added.

Some of the displaced people The New Humanitarian spoke to in al-Mawasi said they are able to get a bit of aid from the few thousand people – mostly Palestinian Bedouin – who lived in the area prior to the war. The local residents have been sharing the crops they grow or the power they generate using solar panels, for example. But it’s far from enough.

Many children, including al-Aqqad’s, go weeks without any protein or nutritional food, relying on the little aid their families can get their hands on, items distributed by local civil society organisations, and the limited supplies still available in stores – for those who can afford it.

“They barely have some bread, tea, and canned food, which is all processed,” al-Aqqad said. “This is why they get sick, their bodies grow weak, and their faces become thin. They do not have the energy to play like before, and have become more withdrawn.”

• The New Humanitarian report