Heavy rain has flooded tens of thousands of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, washing away shelters and soaking the blankets and mattresses families sleep on, local authorities said on Saturday.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said at least 70,000 tents had been flooded in the past 12 hours, affecting tens of thousands of people. No deaths had been reported, though injuries were recorded. The territory’s civil defence service said it had received 1,500 distress calls from displaced residents in the first hours of the storm, and three abandoned houses collapsed without causing injuries.
At a tent encampment in Gaza City, some families tried to repair their shelters while others used sand to keep the water out and carried children from flooded tents. “This is the first day of rain, and of course we are already flooded,” resident Olfat Magdoub told Reuters. “What will happen if it rains again the next day? This is only the first day and we’re already overwhelmed.” She said she had spent four days sleeping on blankets on the floor after an earlier downpour two weeks ago soaked her bedding.
Municipal and civil defence officials said they were unable to cope with the storm because of fuel shortages and damage to equipment. They said hundreds of vehicles, including bulldozers and water pumps, had been destroyed during the war, which has displaced most of Gaza’s more than two million residents and left much of the territory in ruins. Most of the population now lives in tent camps.
The scale of the coming winter is the deeper fear. Gaza’s emergency committee said more than one million displaced people face severe winter-related dangers and that the territory urgently needs about 200,000 tents and heating supplies. Al Jazeera reported that water levels at several shelter sites rose by 30 to 40 centimetres, and that more than 900,000 displaced people are sheltering in al-Mawasi, the coastal area in the south, where rain had been falling since Friday night.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that a few shelter centres had been completely flooded. “What we feared has actually happened,” he said. “A few shelter centers were completely flooded, and everyone inside them has now been forced out into the unknown.”
Hamas blamed Israel for not allowing shelters and construction materials into Gaza. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid, did not immediately comment on that accusation. It said on Friday that it had stepped up efforts to improve sanitary conditions across Gaza before the heavy rain, which had been forecast, in coordination with international organisations. It said four additional vacuum trucks entered Gaza this week through the International Committee of the Red Cross, joining eight others brought in over the past month to support sewage pumping and repairs to water and sewage infrastructure.
A US-brokered ceasefire last year called for the eventual reconstruction of Gaza, but little progress has been made. Negotiators have failed to agree on terms for Hamas to disarm or for Israel to withdraw its troops, which control about two-thirds of the territory and from which residents have been ordered to leave.
“We have no resources, no tarpaulins, no tents and no one is checking on us,” displaced resident Rafiq Ghattas told Reuters, standing barefoot in a large pool of rainwater.
Note: the figure of 70,000 flooded tents comes from the Hamas-run Gaza government media office and has not been independently verified; other reporting describes thousands of tents flooded. The featured image is a file photo from an earlier flooding in Deir el-Balah.
Sources: Reuters, “Heavy rain floods tents housing Gaza displaced people, aid shortages hamper response”; Al Jazeera, “Rains flood thousands of displaced families’ tents in Gaza”.
