Heavy rains have flooded thousands of tents housing displaced Palestinian families across the Gaza Strip, compounding the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s genocidal war and ongoing restrictions on humanitarian aid, as the first winter storm of the season swept through the besieged enclave.
Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said its crews received about 1,500 distress calls in just 10 hours after heavy rain began early Saturday, with water levels in several displacement camps rising by 30-40 cm (12-16 inches).
“What we feared has actually happened,” Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera. “A few shelter centers were completely flooded, and everyone inside them has now been forced out into the unknown.”
Basal warned that premature babies, elderly people and the sick were particularly vulnerable to the worsening conditions.
“Those living in tents are at risk of death at any moment, and of illness at any moment,” he said.
Meanwhile, the storm brought down buildings already weakened by Israel’s genocidal military campaign against Gaza, which began in October 2023.
The Civil Defense agency said rescue crews evacuated residents from a partially collapsed building in the central Nuseirat area after strong winds and heavy rainfall damaged the structure.
In northern Gaza, the wall of another building collapsed under the heavy rainfall, injuring two people, according to the Wafa news agency.
Footage from displacement camps in Gaza City, Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah showed Palestinian families wading through ankle-deep floodwater, with soaked mattresses and blankets and children standing barefoot in pools of mud and sewage.
“Even houses can’t hold up against this rain, so how can open plastic sheeting?” Al Jazeera correspondent Nour Khaled said while reporting from a displacement camp in Gaza City.
She said more than 28,000 widows were among those facing the winter without adequate shelter while caring for their children.
In al-Mawasi, the coastal area in southern Gaza where more than 900,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering, rainfall had continued since 10pm (20:00 GMT) on Friday, Al Jazeera correspondent Rami Abu Taima reported from Khan Younis.
“People woke up to find hundreds, even thousands, of tents flooded across the Gaza Strip,” he said, warning that more than 125,000 families living along the coast were particularly vulnerable to having their tents swept away by the sea.
Gaza’s emergency committee said more than one million displaced Palestinians face severe winter-related dangers, stressing that the enclave urgently needs approximately 200,000 tents and heating supplies.
Raed al-Dahshan, director of Civil Defense in Gaza governorate, said rescue teams had virtually no resources to assist families whose shelters had been inundated.
“Civil Defense does not have a single tarpaulin or a single tent,” he told Al Jazeera. “We deal only with saving lives, and that is not enough.”
Israeli restrictions deepen shelter crisis
Aid organizations have blamed Israeli restrictions on the entry of shelter materials for leaving displaced Palestinians without adequate protection against increasingly severe weather conditions.
Mohammed Salha, director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told Al Jazeera that only 180 to 200 trucks were entering Gaza daily, far below the 600 agreed under the humanitarian protocol of the so-called ceasefire, with only about 40 trucks carrying humanitarian assistance.
“We don’t want to respond after the tents flood,” Salha said, adding that 50,000 tents had been waiting on the Egyptian side of the border.
“We must respond before the disaster happens.”
He described international pressure on the Israeli regime to allow more humanitarian supplies into Gaza as “timid”.