‘Shivering from cold and fear’: winter rains batter displaced Gazans

‘KHAN YUNIS: It only took a matter of minutes after the heavy overnight rain first began to fall for Jamil al-Sharafi’s tent in southern Gaza to flood, drenching his food and leaving his blankets sopping wet.

The winter rains have made an already precarious life worse for people like Sharafi, who is among the hundreds of thousands in the Palestinian territory displaced by the war, many of whom now survive on aid provided by humanitarian organisations.

“My children are shivering from cold and fear… The tent was completely flooded within minutes,” Sharafi, 47, said on Sunday.

“We lost our blankets, and all the food is soaked,” added the father of six, who lives in a makeshift shelter with his children in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi.

A fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been in place since October 10, following two years of devastating fighting.

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But despite the truce, Gazans still face a severe humanitarian crisis, and most of those displaced by the war have been left with little or nothing.

Families are crowded into camps of tents hastily erected from tarpaulins, which are often surrounded by mud and standing water when it rains.

“As an elderly woman, I cannot live in tents. Living in tents means we die from the cold in the rain and from the heat in the summer,” said Umm Rami Bulbul.

“We don’t want reconstruction right now, just provide us and our children with mobile homes.”

Nighttime temperatures in Gaza have ranged between eight and 12 degrees Celsius in recent days.

Insufficient aid

Nearly 80 percent of buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged by the war, according to United Nations data.

And about 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have lost their homes, said Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza.

Of more than 300,000 tents requested to shelter displaced people, “we have received only 60,000”, Shawa told AFP, pointing to Israeli restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid into the territory.

The UN refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, said the harsh weather had compounded the misery of Gazans.

“People in Gaza are surviving in flimsy, waterlogged tents & among ruins,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X.

“There is nothing inevitable about this. Aid supplies are not being allowed in at the scale required.”

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, said in mid-December that “close to 310,000 tents and tarpaulins entered the Gaza Strip recently” as part of an increase in aid under the ceasefire.

Earlier this month, Gaza experienced a similar spell of heavy rain and cold.

The weather caused at least 18 deaths due to the collapse of war-damaged buildings or exposure to cold, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency, which operates under Hamas authority.

On December 18, the UN’s humanitarian office said that 17 buildings collapsed during the storm, while 42,000 tents and makeshift shelters were fully or partially damaged.

“Look at the state of my children and the tent,” said Samia Abu Jabba.

“I sleep in the cold, and water floods us and my children’s clothes. I have no clothes for them to wear. They are freezing,” she said.

“What did the people of Gaza and their children do to deserve this?”