Footage taken months ago shows baby Abdulrahman Abu Judian crawling at an early age. But now his one-year-old mother, Nibin, who lives in a crowded tent camp in central Gaza, fears he will never walk.
“It was really shocking,” Nivin told the BBC, recalling that his son had recently been diagnosed with polio, which left him partially paralyzed in one leg. “I never thought this would happen. He won't be able to crawl or walk anymore, and he's been left without proper medical care.”
Born on October 7, the day of the shocking Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, Abdulrahman should have received his routine vaccinations but never did.
During the war that followed, the Abu Judian family, who live in the northernmost part of the Gaza Strip, moved five times: first to Gaza City, then to other areas in the center, then to Rafah in the south, and then again to Deir al-Bala.
About 90 percent of Gaza's population has lost their homes, health services have been strained and most children have stopped receiving routine vaccinations, leaving them vulnerable to infections like Abdulrahman.
“I feel very guilty about not getting him vaccinated, but because of our situation, we couldn’t get him vaccinated,” says Nivin, rocking her baby in his car seat. She desperately wants to get her son out of Gaza to get treatment. “He wants to live and walk like other children,” she says.
A mother struggles to find clean drinking water for her nine children, and raw sewage flows down the street near the makeshift tent where they live.
It's an ideal environment for diseases to spread, especially the highly contagious polio virus.
Since the virus was discovered in wastewater samples taken in June, UN agencies have been working to set up an emergency mass vaccination program.
