Besieged people in Gaza share shoes, wear same clothes for months

People in Gaza have been sharing shoes and wearing clothes for months as the region has been devasted by 10 months of war.

Finding clothing -- any clothing -- has become increasingly difficult for the 2.4 million people living in the territory besieged by Israel.

Gaza once had a thriving textiles industry but since the war began on October 7 with Palestinian group Hamas's unprecedented attack on Israel, it has received just a trickle of goods.

Children are not the only ones suffering from the lack of clothing in the Gaza Strip, which counted 900 textile factories in the industry's heyday in the early 1990s.

The sector employed 35,000 people and sent four million items to Israel every month. But those numbers have plummeted since 2007, when Hamas took power and Israel blockaded Gaza.

In recent years, Gaza's workshops had dwindled to about 100, employing about 4,000 people and shipping about 30,000-40,000 items a month to Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

By January, three months into the war, the World Bank estimated that 79 percent of Gaza's private sector establishments had been partially or totally destroyed.

Even the factories that are still standing have ground to a halt, after months without electricity in Gaza. Any fuel that arrives for generators is mainly used for hospitals and United Nations facilities such as warehouses and aid-supply points.

In these conditions, finding new clothes is a rare event.

"Some women have been wearing the same headscarf for the past 10 months," Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, posted on X.