A small business in war-time Gaza sews padded cloth diapers, creating jobs and helping weary parents
ABC News
A small sewing workshop making cloth diapers with cotton padding in Gaza's crowded city of Rafah is helping desperate parents with babies afford a basic necessity
RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- Their scissors move quickly, shearing pieces of white cloth to be stitched together with cotton pads and taken to market in battered cardboard boxes.
Before the day is done, the Palestinian seamstresses will have sewn 500 diapers and distributed them to war-weary parents in Gaza for about $4 per package of eight, half of what mass-produced disposable diapers cost in the besieged enclave.
Maysaa Qatati, the manager of the sewing workshop, knows the output will barely make a dent in the huge demand — but the little business is thriving and creating jobs.
“People were looking for pampers and could not find them,” she said from the whirring workshop in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza. “They would stand in line at the merchant and buy it at a very high price.”
The war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe, spawning shortages of the most basic necessities and sending prices of basic goods soaring. The situation has hit parents of young children particularly hard — the going market rate for diapers in Gaza is over 10 times higher than what it was before the war.
