Aid agencies have reiterated calls for Israel to allow more tents and urgently needed supplies into Gaza after the first heavy winter rainfall, saying more than a quarter of a million families need emergency help with shelters.
We are going to lose lives this winter. Children, families will perish, says Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
It's actually so frustrating that we've now lost so many crucial weeks since the adoption of the Trump peace plan, which said humanitarian aid would flow and the Palestinians would not needlessly continue to suffer.
With a majority of the population displaced by two years of a devastating war, most Gazans now live in tents - many of them makeshift.
They have been clearing up after widespread flooding due to a winter storm that began on Friday.
There are fears that diseases could spread as rainwater has mixed with sewage water.
My children are already sick and look at what happened to our tent, said Fatima Hamdona, crying in the rain over the weekend, as she showed a BBC freelance journalist the ankle-deep puddle inside her temporary home in Gaza City.
We don't have food - the flour got all wet. We're people who've been destroyed. Where do we go? There's no shelter for us to go to now.
The story was the same in the southern city of Khan Younis.
Our clothes, mattresses and blankets were flooded, said Nihad Shabat, as she tried to dry out her possessions there on Monday.
Her family has been sleeping inside a shelter made of sheets and blankets.
We're worried about getting flooded again. We cannot afford to buy a tent.
A recent UN report found that across Gaza more than 80% of buildings had been destroyed and 92% in Gaza City.
According to the NRC - which has long led the so-called Shelter Cluster in Gaza, made up of some 20 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - about 260,000 Palestinian families, or about 1.5 million people, are in need of emergency shelter assistance, lacking the basics to get through winter.
The NGOs say they have been able to get only about 19,000 tents into Gaza since the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect on 10 October.
They say they have 44,000 pallets of aid - containing non-food items, including tents and bedding - blocked from entering. Supplies that have been bought are currently stuck in Egypt, Jordan and Israel.
Jan Egeland blames what he calls a bureaucratic, military, politicised quagmire running counter to all humanitarian principles for the hold-up.
In March, Israel introduced a new registration process for aid groups working in Gaza, citing security reasons. It requires that they give lists of their local Palestinian staff.
However, aid groups say that data protection laws in donor countries prevent them from handing over such information.
Many items, including tent poles, are also classed as dual-use by Israel, meaning they have a military as well as civilian purpose, and their entry is banned or heavily restricted.
On Sunday the Israeli defense body, Cogat, posted on X: Over the last few months, in preparation for the winter and protection from the rain, COGAT coordinated with the international community and facilitated close to 140,000 tarpaulins directly to the residents of the Gaza Strip.
They called on international organizations to coordinate more tents and tarpaulins and other winter humanitarian responses.
International aid groups are hoping that a new US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center will help ease restrictions on their work.
With a foreign donor conference on reconstruction in the Palestinian territory expected to take place in Egypt soon, they say basic shelter supplies must be allowed to enter while longer-term plans are developed.
It would not be a good thing if all these nations meet in Cairo to discuss long-term reconstruction for Palestinians in great need if they die before their high-rise buildings can be reconstructed, says Mr Egeland, who was previously the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator.
They need a tent today, they don't need a promise of a beachfront structure in five years.
