For Rabab al-Hajj Youssef, every trip to the bathroom to change her sanitary pad is a painful experience. After Israeli strikes displaced her family from their home in Lebanon to a shelter, she shares limited water with hundreds of people.
“Sometimes there’s no water for a girl to wash and change. There’s no basket in the bathroom – there’s no basket for a girl to put her sanitary pad,” Youssef, 29, told Reuters.
She had fled with her young children from her home in the city of Baalbek, in eastern Lebanon, just days earlier to a school-turned-shelter further west.
Thousands of people have fled the same region over the last two weeks, after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for Baalbek and nearby towns and began pounding the region with deadly strikes. They are among more than 1.2 million displaced by Israel’s escalating campaign against armed group Hezbollah.
Nearly 200,000 of them now live across 1,145 collective shelters – most of which are at capacity. The numbers are growing and as winter sets in, so are the needs.
In the school where Youssef and her family have sought refuge, the biggest shortage is clean water.
“You have to take your underwear and wash it. I wait for my daughter at the bathroom door to wash in freezing water – freezing – so she can change and wear the sanitary pad,” she told Reuters.
Privacy is also an issue. There are no baskets in some of the shared bathrooms, Youssef said, so girls need to bring bags with them, which some girls deem embarrassing if men are around.
“Without water, there is a lot of humiliation,” she added.
More than 11,000 pregnant women are among the newly displaced population in Lebanon, according to the UN sexual health and reproductive rights agency (UNFPA), needing access to prenatal care, nutrition, clean water and hygiene supplies.
One pregnant woman in the displaced shelter told Reuters she was afraid she would have a pre-term baby.
“We are really concerned about the nutrition of the newborn babies and the nutrition of the underaged (minors) as well,” said Hussein Alharati, Relief International’s Health Program Coordinator in the Bekaa valley.
The World Health Organisation said it had already documented cases of measles, hepatitis A and other infectious diseases among the displaced, and warned this week that a resurgence may be possible as the number of displaced people “in suboptimal shelter conditions” grows.
Rita Abou Nabhan, a lactation specialist with Relief International, said that despite distributions of hygiene kits and sanitary pads to women at the shelter in the Bekaa, the biggest fear is lack of water.
“We can see it in their eyes and hear it in their words, how afraid they are that they will get infections that grow,” she said.