In brief
Heavy rain across Gaza on Saturday displaced thousands of families as water rose up to 40 cm in shelters. Gaza’s civil defence received 1,500 distress calls in ten hours, and aid agencies warn that restrictions hamper supply delivery. Overnight, buildings collapsed, and many tents were swept away by the storm, leaving over a million people in peril.
Heavy rain began early Saturday over the Gaza Strip, flooding thousands of tents and forcing displaced Palestinian families out into the cold as water rose by up to 40 cm.
In the Gaza civil defence agency reported that its crews received about 1,500 distress calls in just 10 hours after the storm started.
"What we feared has actually happened," Civil Defence spokesperson 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 warned that premature babies, the elderly and the sick were most at risk, adding that “those living in tents are at risk of death at any moment, and of illness at any moment.”
The storm also knocked down buildings damaged in the 2023 conflict; rescuers evacuated a building in the central Nuseirat area that partially collapsed in the strong winds and rain, while a wall in northern Gaza collapsed, injuring two people according to the Wafa news agency.
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, and Al Jazeera reporter Nour Khaled remarked that even houses can’t hold up against this rain, “so how can open plastic sheeting?”
Rami Abu Taima, reporting from Khan Younis, said people had woken up to find hundreds, even thousands, of tents flooded across the Strip, and that more than 125,000 families living along the coast were at particular risk of having their tents swept away by the sea.
The Gaza emergency committee said more than one million displaced people face the dangers of winter and that the territory urgently needs about 200,000 tents along with heating supplies. Director Raed al‑Dahshan told Al Jazeera that crews could do little once they reached flooded families, noting that the ongoing conflict limits aid deliveries.
