'Water has become a luxury' Gazans face daily struggle to find essential supplies

In a house in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, some of the women in a building housing 60 people decided to cut their hair short to save on water when washing. Others in southern Gaza say they are stretching out the time between showers, or flushes of the toilet. Everyone knows exactly how much water they have, and how much they can store. Above all they know that water, especially water that is both safe to drink and doesn't taste bad, has become precious.

- Ruth Michaelson

"We store the water used for bathing and washing in a barrel that we keep in the yard of the house," said Maha Hussaini, a journalist and humanitarian who sought refuge in Deir al-Balah, who described by text message how she was getting by through rationing her water supply for herself, and even for her cat, during the day.

"When did clean drinking water become a luxury?" she posted on social media.

Hussaini said she and her family were surviving by buying as many bottles of water as they can find every couple of days, but even this has become difficult as prices have risen sharply. On Monday, she sent a text message to say she had returned from the local market, and there was no bottled water at all.

"We don't currently have running water," she said. "In order to bathe, we usually put water bottles in the sun to heat the water as we also don't have cooking gas."

In Khan Younis, at the southern end of Gaza, Mohammed Ghalayini described in a phone call how the price of bottled water fluctuated according to the aid supply. When supplies were tight, a 1.5-litre bottle of water could be more than twice the standard price of 2 NIS (new Israeli shekels - about 43p).

"No one can find a water container to buy for love nor money," he said.

Israeli officials, who oversee the water pipes to Gaza, cut the majority of water supplies to the enclave in mid-October after Hamas's attack on southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed.

In the two months since, northern Gaza has been without water while most of the territory's 2.3 million population displaced to the south have spent hours queueing for water at municipal desalination plants, washing in water from buckets or waiting for a vanishing and irregular supply of water to come through their taps.