Guillain-Barré syndrome: A rare disease crippling Gaza's children under Israel's siege and war

In Gaza, death no longer comes from just Israeli airstrikes. It creeps into overcrowded tents, polluted water barrels, and under-resourced hospital wards, in the form of a rare neurological disease that is devastating the besieged coastal enclave's children.

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a condition once so rare that Gaza's doctors once saw one or two cases every couple of years, is now striking at a rate of over a hundred cases in just two months.

According to doctors in the war-torn Gaza Strip, half are under the age of 15. For families already enduring nearly two years of relentless Israeli bombardment and siege, it is yet another cruel front in a war on life itself.

Watching children slip away

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, six-year-old Sadeen al-Najjar lies motionless, her small frame framed by tubes and wires. Once a lively child who filled her home with laughter, she now stares ahead, unable to move, according to her mother, Maisaa.

Maisaa, who has not left her daughter's side for weeks, strokes her Sadeen forehead as if willing movement back into her limbs.

"She was playing and laughing. Suddenly, she told me she couldn't see clearly. Her legs felt weak. Two days later, she couldn't move at all. It's like life stopped inside her tiny body," the 39-year-old mother told The New Arab.

The worst moment, she says, came when doctors said Sadeen's life depended on a ventilator. The doctors were forced to cut a hole in her throat so she could breathe.

"I can't bear to see her like this. I'm terrified she'll grow up trapped in this body," the mother said.

In the Mawasi area in Khan Younis City in the south of Gaza, Maram Zourob, 11, shares a similar fate.

Her tent stands near puddles tinged green from sewage, where flies hover above food unfit for human consumption.

"The water here is polluted; the food makes the children sick. Maram was always running, jumping, and full of energy. Now she can’t even dress herself," Umm Mohammed, her mother, told TNA. "I can't afford treatment. I can't take her out of Gaza as the borders are closed. Every day she loses more of her childhood, and I can't do anything. All I want is to see her walk again."

For Jibara Kawari, an eight-year-old boy from Gaza City, leaving the hospital may happen, but not in the way he entered it. Once the child who would wake his mother at dawn, football in hand, begging to run to the dusty pitch with his friends, he now sits in a wheelchair, watching other children play in front of his tent.

"My body hurts. I can't walk," he told TNA, his voice faint.

"He just wants to stand for a minute. Do you know what it means for a mother to watch her son beg for something so simple and not be able to give it to him? Every day, he asks me when he can go back to school, when he can kick a ball again. I have no answers, only prayers," Um Jibara, his mother, said to TNA.

"I'm afraid his whole childhood will be spent in hospital beds, watching life happen to other children while he sits on the sidelines," she added.

An outbreak with no cure 

Ahmed al-Farra, director of the children's department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, warns that the war-torn coastal enclave is entering "a dangerous, unprecedented phase."

"GBS attacks the peripheral nerves and can paralyse the respiratory muscles, forcing us to use ventilators," he told TNA, saying that "without early treatment, and the medicine is almost impossible to find now, it can be fatal."

According to al-Farra, three deaths have already been recorded, including two children and an elderly woman.

Gaza's hospitals, he added, lack MRI and nerve conduction machines, while the life-saving immunoglobulin treatment is almost entirely unavailable.

As a result, he explained, tests sent to laboratories in Jordan and Palestinian territories occupied in 1948, along with the results of these tests, identified the outbreak as caused by Enterovirus, which spreads through the digestive system.

"The contamination of Gaza's water supply, particularly in displacement areas like Mawasi, where sewage and drinking water mix, is the most likely cause," al-Farra added.

This outbreak comes amid a wider public health collapse: children weakened by chronic malnutrition are now increasingly vulnerable to respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases that have surged under the siege.

Israel's genocidal war began in October 2023, and has killed over 61,000 people, most of them women and children, and injured 154,000 more. More than 9,000 are still missing, likely under the rubble, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

On 2 March, following the end of the first phase of a short-lived truce, Israel further tightened its siege. Crossings were sealed to fuel, food, and medical supplies, with only a trickle allowed through.

For Gaza's two million residents, most displaced, many in makeshift tents, the result has been the near-total collapse of health services.

Before the war, Gaza's medical system was already strained by the 17-year blockade. Now, dozens of hospitals and clinics lie in ruins. The few still functioning operate at less than half capacity, short of doctors, nurses, equipment, and medicine.

The Ministry of Health repeatedly said that the local hospitals can no longer absorb the influx of war-wounded and sick patients.

Medicines for chronic illnesses such as cancer, kidney failure, and heart disease have been depleted. Conditions that were once treatable now threaten to become death sentences.

Guillain-Barré syndrome was never part of Gaza's public health crisis until now. Israel's war and siege have created the perfect conditions for its spread: malnutrition, contaminated water, and the impossibility of timely treatment.

For the mothers watching their children's bodies betray them, the disease is not just a medical condition but a thief of futures. The combination of war, disease, and blockade has reduced hope to the smallest of measures: a breath without a machine, a step taken without help.