In Gaza, makeshift shelters flooded again by heavy rains

Two weeks after being hit hard by storm Byron, Palestinians in Gaza suffered once again last night from stormy weather hitting the region.

"Everything has been flooded," says Jamil al-Sharafi, one of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza, who woke up Sunday feeling helpless after another night of torrential rains in the war-ravaged territory.

"We lost our blankets, all the food is soaked," the 47-year-old father of six told AFP from the coastal Mawassi region in the South, where he was displaced near Khan Younis. "My children are shivering from the cold and fear."

AFP images filmed Sunday in Gaza City show tents pitched facing the sea and battered by icy winds, as residents try to reinforce the ropes to prevent their shelters from blowing away.

Amid these makeshift camps built quickly with tarps distributed by aid organizations, pools of standing water stagnate on muddy pathways.

Using a broken shovel, a woman tries to build a mound to stop water from entering her tent.

In Deir al-Balah (central Gaza), Um Mouin and her four children were awakened in the middle of the night by the downpour. "Water was flooding into the tent," said the 34-year-old Palestinian woman, saying she has "nowhere else to go."

Another resident is calling for prefab homes to protect families. "Living in a tent means dying of cold when it rains and of heat in the summer," lamented Um Rami.

In mid-December, Gaza already experienced another bout of heavy rain and cold as storm Byron passed.

Those conditions caused at least 18 deaths due to collapsing ruinous buildings or the effects of the cold, which proved fatal for several newborns who died of hypothermia, as reported by Gaza's Civil Defense.

A fragile cease-fire has been in place since Oct. 10 in Gaza, after two years of genocidal war waged by the Israeli army against the besieged enclave, where at least 71,266 people have been killed since October 2023, including 414 since the start of the truce.

'Tired of this life'

The arrival of winter has further worsened the humanitarian crisis affecting the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million residents.

In the territory, nearly 80 percent of existing structures have been damaged or destroyed by the war, according to U.N. data, while 1.5 million Gazans have "lost their homes," Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network in Gaza, told AFP.

Of the more than 300,000 tents requested to shelter displaced people, "we have received only 60,000," he noted, denouncing Israeli restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid, while hundreds of trucks loaded with winter shelters remain blocked by Israel at the entrance to the Gaza Strip.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Dec. 18 that at least 235,000 people had been affected. It reported the collapse of 17 buildings and the partial or complete damage to 42,000 tents or makeshift shelters.

Mohamed al-Souweirki, 39 and displaced in the Nuseirat area (central Gaza), described his exhaustion after this series of storms.

"The wind tore off part of our tent," he said. "We're out in the street, and we're afraid the weather will stay like this. We can't take it anymore, we're tired of this life."

The Civil Defense has warned of the imminent arrival of a "new depression," expected in the coming hours with "heavy rain and strong winds" lasting until Monday night.