“Everything was flooded”, laments Jamil al-Charafi, one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from the Gaza Strip, who woke up helpless on Sunday, after a night of rain in this war-ravaged Palestinian territory, reports AFP, according to News.ro.
“We lost our blankets, all the food is full of water,” a 47-year-old father of six told AFP in the coastal region of Mawassi (south), where he was relocated, near Khan Yunis. “My children are shivering with cold and fear.”
Images shot by AFP on Sunday in Gaza City show tents set up facing the sea, buffeted by a wind and residents trying to consolidate anchorages to avoid their shelters being blown away by the wind.
In the middle of these hastily erected camps, with tarps distributed by humanitarian organizations, there are puddles of water on muddy paths.
With a broken shovel, a woman was trying to raise a mound to prevent water from entering the tent where she lives.
In Deir al-Balah, Oum Mouin and her four children were awakened during the night by the flood. “The water was about to flood the tent,” said the 34-year-old Palestinian, who said she had “nowhere to go.”
Another calls for prefabricated houses to protect families. “Living in a tent means dying of cold, rain and heat in the summer”, laments Oum Rami.
A precarious truce has been in effect since October in the Gaza Strip, after two years of bloody war between the Israeli army and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
But a humanitarian crisis strongly affects the Gaza Strip and the 2.2 million inhabitants of the enclave.
Almost 80% of the buildings that existed in the Gaza Strip were damaged or destroyed in the war, according to UN data.
“Tired Of This Life”
Approximately 1.5 million inhabitants of the enclave have “lost their home”, says AFP, in Gaza, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network, Amjad Al-Chawa.
Of the more than 300,000 tents requested to shelter the displaced, “we received only 60,000”, he states, denouncing Israeli restrictions on sending humanitarian aid.
COGAT, the body within the Israeli Ministry of Defense in charge of Palestinian Civil Affairs, recently announced that 310,000 tents and tarpaulins and 1,800 trucks carrying “warm blankets and clothes” had arrived in the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday, he evoked the entry into the Gaza Strip – within a week – of 4,200 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid.
The aid authorized to enter does not rise “to the level of expectations”, the director of the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini lamented on Sunday.
“A brutal winter adds to more than two years of suffering. The population of the Gaza Strip survives in flooded tents in the middle of the ruins,” he warns.
In mid-December, the Gaza Strip was hit by an episode of heavy rain and cold during Storm Byron.
These bad weather resulted in 19 deaths – due to collapse of ruined buildings or because of the cold – according to the Civil Defense, a rescue organization under Hamas.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced on December 18 that at least 235,000 people were affected.
OCHA reports the destruction of 17 buildings – in addition to 42,000 tents or improvised shelters totally or partially damaged.
A displaced person in the Nuseirat region (center), Mohamed al-Souweirki, aged 39, says he is fed up with this series of bad weather.
“The wind blew part of our tent off,” he declares. “We are in the street and we fear that the weather will continue like this, we can't do it anymore, we are tired of this life”.
The Civil Defense warned of the imminence of a “new depression”, predicted in the coming hours, with “heavy rains and violent winds”, which will last until Monday evening.
