This is what humanitarian collapse looks like: vermin moving freely through garbage, ruined buildings, and tents—and attacking people wherever they go.
A boy in Khan Yunis displays the bites he has received from vermin on March 30, 2026.
Gaza—Yasmeen al-Jamala still hears her infant son’s scream.
One night, her baby suddenly cried out. She switched on a flashlight and found his face covered in blood. A large weasel, big as a cat, had attacked him while he slept.
“Now I dream that something is coming for him every night,” she says.
Since that night, she checks her son repeatedly after he falls asleep. Every unfamiliar sound sends her reaching for a flashlight. Like many parents in Gaza, she says she no longer fears only what falls from the sky. She fears what emerges from the darkness after the bombing stops.
The world watches Gaza through the spectacle of bombs, tanks, and diplomacy. Yet some of the clearest evidence of the humanitarian collapse we now face comes in much smaller forms: weasels, rats, and other vermin moving freely through tents, hospitals, and ruined neighborhoods.
For many outside Gaza, rats may sound like a secondary concern when compared with bombs and bullets. But anyone who has lived through humanitarian disasters understands their significance. Rats spread disease. They contaminate food supplies. They transform misery into something even more degrading.
This is what prolonged humanitarian collapse feels like—not a single dramatic moment, but the slow accumulation of indignities that make ordinary life almost impossible.
The rats are simply the most visible warning.
According to Gaza municipality spokesperson Hosni Mhanna, more than 350,000 tons of garbage now lie uncollected across Gaza City, alongside roughly 25 million tons of rubble. The destruction of Gaza’s sewage systems and Israel’s refusal to allow the entry of adequate supplies of pesticides have created ideal conditions for rodents to multiply.
Their presence is a reminder that modern warfare does not end with explosions. It lingers in the poisoned water, the mountains of uncollected rubbish, the collapsed sewage systems and the desperate overcrowding that follows. Rodents thrive because the systems that keep human beings healthy and safe have collapsed. They run through streets where children still play because there is nowhere else for either of them to go. They climb over tents pitched beside mountains of rubbish because families have nowhere else to sleep. They enter homes whose doors no longer close because explosions have shattered the walls. They terrorize children trying to sleep in makeshift shelters.
Families have developed new nightly rituals. Before trying to sleep, they shake out blankets, inspect mattresses, and shine cell-phone flashlights into the corners of tents. Shoes are turned upside down before anyone slips them on in the morning. Food, when there is any, is hung from ropes or placed on makeshift shelves in the hope that rodents cannot reach it. Parents keep watch long after their children fall asleep, listening for the scratching sounds that signal another unwelcome visitor.
Sleep itself has become fragmented. Many people have told me that they wake repeatedly through the night, startled by movement against the tent walls or by the sound of plastic sheeting rustling. For a population already exhausted by months of bombardment, displacement and hunger, even the few hours meant for rest are no longer safe.
Almost every dawn, I watch them from my window. Rats and weasels emerge from the darkness and disappear into the ruined houses opposite our building, entering homes where families continue trying to live.
