Rains flood 70,000 displaced families’ tents in Gaza

About 70,000 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians have been flooded in the Gaza Strip within 12 hours of the first winter storm of the season, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.

In a statement on Saturday, the office said initial losses were estimated at about $3m. Dozens of walls had collapsed and people had been injured, it said, while cracked buildings at risk of collapse posed a growing danger.

The office held Israel “fully responsible” for what it called a disaster caused by the continued closure of crossings and the blocking of shelter and reconstruction materials. It urged the international community and UN agencies to intervene immediately to protect the displaced.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said its crews received about 1,500 distress calls in just 10 hours after the rain began early on Saturday, with water levels in several shelter sites rising by 30-40cm (12-16 inches).

“What we feared has actually happened,” civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera. “A few shelter centres were completely flooded, and everyone inside them has now been forced out into the unknown.”

Basal said premature babies, the elderly and the sick were most at risk. “Those living in tents are at risk of death at any moment, and of illness at any moment,” he said.

The storm also brought down buildings damaged in Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave that began in October 2023.

The civil defence agency said rescuers had evacuated residents of a building in the central Nuseirat area that partially collapsed in the strong winds and rain. In northern Gaza, the wall of a separate building fell down due to heavy rainfall, injuring two people, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Footage from camps in Gaza City, Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah showed families wading through ankle-deep water, mattresses and blankets soaked, 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?” said Al Jazeera’s Nour Khaled, reporting from a camp in Gaza City. She said more than 28,000 widows were among those facing the winter alone with their children.

In al-Mawasi, the coastal area where more than 900,000 displaced people are sheltering in southern Gaza, rain had been falling since 10pm (20:00 GMT) on Friday, Al Jazeera’s Rami Abu Taima reported from Khan Younis.

“People woke up to find hundreds, even thousands, of tents flooded across the Gaza Strip,” he said. He added that more than 125,000 families living along the coast were at particular risk of having their tents swept away by the sea.

Gaza’s emergency committee said more than one million displaced people face a harsh winter, and that the territory urgently needs about 200,000 tents along with heating supplies.

Raed al-Dahshan, director of civil defence in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that crews could do little once they reached flooded families. “Civil defence does not have a single tarpaulin or a single tent,” he said. “We deal only with saving lives, and that is not enough.”

The storm also hit Gaza’s battered health system. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, told Al Jazeera that the hospital’s emergency department flooded and was out of service for about four hours. He warned of a rise in gastrointestinal, respiratory and skin infections as sewage mixed with rainwater inside tents.

“We will see many deaths, in the dozens and perhaps the hundreds, among newborns who need warmth in these tents,” he said.

Reporting from Gaza City port, Al Jazeera’s Ghazi al-Aloul said thousands of families had pitched tents along the shoreline, where they face strong winds and rising tides. “These tents will flood first from the rain, and second from seawater,” he said.

Many of the tents were put up in the first year of displacement and are now in their fourth, patched and re-stitched by their owners. Under the ceasefire’s humanitarian protocol, they were supposed to be replaced with caravans, which Israel has not allowed into the territory.

One displaced man on the beach told Al Jazeera: “They pushed us west towards the sea. Why don’t they just throw us into the sea and be done with it?”

Mohammed Salha, director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told Al Jazeera that only 180 to 200 trucks were entering Gaza daily, far short of the 600 agreed under the humanitarian protocol of the “ceasefire”, and that only about 40 of those carried humanitarian aid.

“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 Israel to allow in more supplies as “timid”.