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Attack in Gaza Strip kills at least six people Heavy rain floods temporary campHealth officials said tents were ripped from the ground, exposing displaced families, including young children, to the cold.
Five people, including two women and a little girl, died after a house housing displaced families collapsed near the Gaza City coastline, and a toddler died of hypothermia in a tent in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, medics said.
Among the dead were three members of the same family – 72-year-old Mohammed Hammouda, his 15-year-old granddaughter and his daughter-in-law, medics reported. According to medics, they died when an 8m-high wall collapsed on their tent during strong winds along the coast of Gaza City.
At least five people were injured in the collapse.
The storm, driven by strong winds and torrential rain, swept through Gaza overnight, flooding hundreds of tents and leaving families scrambling to find what was left. Some tents were torn from their stilts and thrown dozens of meters, while others collapsed into the mud.
Relatives gathered Tuesday morning to clear rubble from the collapsed wall and rebuild tent shelters for surviving family members.
“We didn’t realize what was happening until the wall started to collapse,” Basel Hammouda told Reuters after the funeral of a relative.
“Due to the speed and force of the wind, the wall fell on us, crushing three tents.”
In other parts of Gaza City, people tried to fortify remaining shelters to prevent flooding by hammering nails back into the ground and stacking sandbags around tents.
Dozens of families were seen salvaging belongings that had washed into the Mediterranean.
Saeed Saadallah, a 65-year-old Gaza City resident whose tent was swept into the water, said his family of 10 had nowhere to go.
“The sea is hitting us, the wind is hitting us, the rain is hitting us,” he told the news agency, pointing to the shoreline where clothes and bedding were missing.
three months later Ceasefire halts major fightingThe Israeli army has ordered the almost complete clearing of nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s population, driving more than 2 million people into a narrow coastal strip. Most displaced families live in flimsy tents or severely damaged buildings.
Local officials said fuel shortages and damaged equipment hampered the response to the storm. Municipal and civil protection teams said many vehicles, including bulldozers and water pumps, were damaged or destroyed during the war, leaving them unable to cope with flooding.
The Gaza government media office said at least 31 Palestinians have died since the start of winter due to exposure to the cold or the collapse of unsafe buildings damaged by early Israeli airstrikes.
The toddler in Deir al-Balah is the seventh person to die from hypothermia since the start of winter, including a seven-day-old newborn and a four-year-old girl, the health ministry said, with deaths reported earlier this week.
Winter temperatures in Gaza typically hover around 12 degrees Celsius and can drop to 10 to 15 degrees Celsius at night, conditions that can be life-threatening for infants and the elderly living in thin plastic shelters.
The United Nations says the approximately 1.5 million people still displaced are in urgent need of at least 300,000 new tents. In December, a United Nations report warned that hundreds of displacement sites were at high risk of flooding.
“In Gaza, winter weather is exacerbating the suffering of families already pushed to the brink,” UNRWA said, warning that cold, flooding and damaged shelters put displaced people at new dangers, while humanitarian access remains restricted.
Israel says hundreds of aid trucks are entering Gaza every day, delivering food, medical supplies and shelter materials, but international aid groups say supplies remain insufficient.
This is the third winter in Gaza since Israel launched war on the besieged territory in October 2023.