iPhone 5s Screen - Black Horizontal Lines/Faded Color

Hello, all!

A user at the school I work at approached me with a problem with her phone the other day. As I am not familiar with phone issues (I support PCs for the most part), I decided to approach the community with the question.

Let me preface this with the following: We are located in Palau (a small island east of the Philippines), so shipping takes 2 or so weeks to arrive here (shipping costs are not a concern, as they cost the same as shipping to the US due to Palau's postal service being USPS). As such, just keep in mind it will take a while to get things here.

Symptoms: The first half-inch of the top of the screen is entirely unaffected. From there on down, is where the issue is. When the issue first arose, there were horizontal lines of pixels that were duplicating what was displayed on pixels about a quarter-to-half-an-inch above them. These lines of pixels alternated with semi-working/discolored lines of pixels. So, when there was a line of text, there was a faded duplicate about half an inch below it. Since then, however, it has changed: the lines that were previously duplicating text are now black, and the lines that are "working" are still discolored. Pictures don't do that great of a job of showing the issue, but here are a couple (one of the screen, the other of the lines through a magnifying glass):

Pic of screen

Pic of screen through magnifying glass

(Potentially) related incident: I asked her about the recent history of her phone. She said that she dropped it, but it's been quite a while (not sure how long, but more than two weeks ago). Also, about 2 or so weeks ago, her phone got wet (I believe it was in a bag that got rained on a bit). She left it in rice for a couple of days, and it worked perfectly fine for about two weeks. I am unsure as to whether this is related, due to the delay.

She said she read online that it might be fixed by "hitting the back of it" (I took this to mean that the screen may have a loose connection), but this hasn't done anything. I've done some reading myself, and it does sound like it could potentially be a loose connection (especially since the symptoms have changed slightly in the past couple of days... Perhaps the connector has shifted a little). However, I wanted to ask on here to get a second opinion.

I would pop the thing open right now to check whether it's a loose connector, but I've asked everyone I know, and checked (literally) every electronics store in the country (small island country ;) ), and no one has the pentalobe bits available. So, I'm getting ready to order a set and settle in for the 2-week wait. I just wanted to check and see whether the loose connection thoery was plausible, so that if not we could look into ordering a new screen (because if there's a chance it is just the connector, the wait would be preferable in this situation).

Thanks!

ElectroPulse