KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — In their bare-bones tent in southern Gaza, Mostafa Shaaban built his family’s makeshift toilet behind a curtain in a corner. He dug a shallow pit in the sandy soil, poured a concrete slab around it, fixed a bottomless bucket over the hole, then topped it off with a battered, plastic toilet seat.

It reeks with a foul odor and buzzes with flies and mosquitoes only a few feet from where they sleep and prepare meals. Every week, Shaaban has to dig out the sewage sludge from the pit. But at least it’s more private than the fetid communal latrines used by hundreds of other people in their sprawling tent camp.

“I did not want the kids and my wife to use any public toilet. It is humiliating,” said the 38-year-old Shaaban, who was driven from his home city of Rafah two years ago during the war between Israel and Hamas, and eventually settled in a tent camp in Khan Younis.

“The situation is revolting,” he said of having the toilet inside the tent, “but at least it has more dignity.”

There is not a single proper toilet across the vast tent cities housing most of Gaza’s 1.7 million Palestinians left homeless by the war. Displaced families have largely been left to dig their own latrines, some shared by extended families.

At communal camp toilets, men, women, and children wait in long lines, then do their business behind a thin cloth or sheet of metal separating them from the crowd of strangers outside. Women fear walking to the communal toilets at night.

The result is a hygienic........

© The Times of Israel