The first winter storm of the season flooded about 70,000 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians across the Gaza Strip within 12 hours on Saturday, November 7, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, deepening a shelter crisis for families now in their fourth winter of displacement.
Rain began falling around 10 pm on Friday in al-Mawasi, the coastal area of southern Gaza where more than 900,000 displaced people are sheltering, and spread across the territory.
Gaza’s Civil Defence agency said its crews received about 1,500 distress calls in the first 10 hours of rainfall. The media office said the flooding affected tens of thousands of people and caused injuries, though no deaths had been reported.
The Electronic Intifada, citing the office and Civil Defence, put the number of people in the flooded tents at more than 350,000.
Reuters reported that municipal and civil defence officials said they could not cope with the storm because of fuel shortages and damaged equipment.
Raed al-Dahshan, director of Civil Defence in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that crews lacked even basic shelter materials to help affected families. Residents described being left to fend for themselves. Rafiq Ghattas, who was standing barefoot in a pool of rainwater, told Reuters that “no one is checking on us”.
Many of the tents were put up during the first year of displacement and are now in their fourth year of use, patched and re-stitched by their owners. Along the coast, thousands of families have pitched tents on the shoreline and at Gaza City’s port, leaving them exposed to strong winds and rising tides.
Reporters in Khan Younis said more than 125,000 families living along the coast risk having their shelters swept away by the sea.
The UN’s humanitarian office, OCHA, warned on Saturday that heavy rainfall placed families living in flood-prone areas and damaged buildings at immediate risk. More than 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza live in tents or other makeshift shelters, and the UN estimates that about 950,000 displaced people are in areas exposed to flooding, according to HNGN’s account of the UN figures.
Gaza’s emergency committee said more than one million displaced people face a harsh winter, and that the territory urgently needs around 200,000 tents and heating supplies. A spokesperson said 50,000 tents are waiting on the Egyptian side of the border, and urged action before the shelters flood, not after.
Health officials have also sounded the alarm. Munir al-Bursh, a doctor in Gaza, warned of serious dangers for newborns, premature babies, the elderly and the sick, who are most at risk of illness in damp, cold tents. Hospitals, already stretched, were also hit by the storm, according to Al Jazeera.
Rights groups say the crisis could have been foreseen. Al Mezan said the flooding of the tents was “neither unexpected nor unforeseen”, and the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that depriving people of shelter, whether through destruction or severe weather, wears down their ability to stay on their land.
Palestinian officials and rights groups accuse Israel of blocking the entry of shelter supplies, and the Government Media Office has called on the United Nations and humanitarian agencies to step in at once.
The storm has also revived questions about whether the ceasefire framework has delivered enough aid. With more rain expected through the winter, aid groups say what happens at the border crossings in the coming days will decide how many families get shelter before the next storm.
