Heavy winter storms in Gaza put hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in tents at risk as Israel continues to restrict emergency aid.
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
GAZA CITY—Palestinians in Gaza woke up Friday morning to heavy winter rains flooding streets, mixing rubble into mud, and drenching tents—creating an even more dangerous and miserable situation for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Israel’s genocidal war and living without adequate shelter.
“We were flooded by the rain, us and our young children,” Raed Al-Kafarna, who was displaced with his family from Beit Hanoun to Gaza City, told Drop Site. “Our tent was flooded and ruined. There is nothing to protect us from the rain. Our clothes are wet. The floor of the tent is all water.”
Al-Kafarna’s young children stood beside him, barefoot in the mud, as he spoke. Inside his tent, sand and mud had spread across the ground, soaking the family’s scant belongings. The Palestinian Meteorological Department issued warnings of more flash floods in areas across Gaza, with strong winds, heavy rain, and thunderstorms expected over the coming days.
“The winter season has begun and all the tents are ruined. There are tents that collapsed on top of the people inside from the amount of rain that came down. We are displaced, now we have rain, we have to search for a morsel of food, we have to search for water to wash our children or to drink. We have nothing,” he said. “Our nerves are shot. Every minute we wait for what is going to happen to us next. What is happening now is harder than the displacement itself.”
The surrounding streets were completely flooded—transformed into shallow rivers with mounds of rubble on the banks. People dug simple trenches in between crowded rows of tents in a futile effort to redirect the water …
