Severe rainfall and flooding on Wednesday have devastated the brutally tough living conditions in the coastal Gaza strip, as stormy weather tore flimsy tents and flooded families’ shelters.
The UN has reported that around 85% of Gaza’s population of 2 million have become displaced since October 7, with the devastating war having driven civilians from their homes and forced them into makeshift shelters, such as flimsy tents.
The harrowing living conditions in Gaza have raised global concern over food shortages, disease outbreaks, and limited supply of water and electricity.
A short video published by Al Jazeera shows families living in improvised, flimsy tents, with a mother of two sons saying she “didn’t know where to put [her] children” as rainwater gushed into her tent. She said that her family didn’t have “anything underneath [them]” since many tents do not have groundsheets, forcing people to sleep on the flooded, wet sand.
Doctors warn that “diseases are spreading in cramped, unsanitary conditions,” the video recalled, adding that Gaza is facing a “public health disaster”.
“Dying as martyrs would be better than dying here,” Hanaa Abu Saif, a displaced Palestinian, exclaimed in the video. She told reporters that her daughters “slept on water” and that all their blankets were drenched from the floods.
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“[The tent] is torn and water poured on us. We were drenched,” said Ramadan Mohadad, a middle-aged Palestinian man, describing the overnight heavy rain that took hold in Rafah. “We tried as much as we could to protect ourselves so water would not get through but rain got in … This plastic does not protect people sleeping under it.”
Rafah, on the border with Egypt, is the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, where people have been arriving in ever-growing numbers to seek refuge from intense fighting between Israel and Hamas, now raging in both the north and south.
“Almost half” of Gaza’s population is now in Rafah, UN Palestine humanitarian coordinator Lynn Hastings told the Guardian, stressing that it has “long ago exceeded its capacity.” People have been arriving in their hundreds of thousands to the Southern Gazan camp, to seek refuge from intense fighting, which rages in the North and South parts of the strip.
Over 18,400 Palestinians have been killed, with 50,000 injured by Israeli air strikes and ground invasions in the Gaza Strip after Israeli occupation forces launched their bloody campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on October 7. Civilians account for 80 percent of these deaths.
