Aid agencies have reiterated calls for Israel to allow more tents and urgently needed supplies into Gaza after the first heavy winter rainfall, saying more than a quarter of a million families need emergency help with shelters.
“We are going to lose lives this winter. Children, families will perish,” says Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“It’s actually so frustrating that we’ve now lost so many crucial weeks since the adoption of the Trump peace plan, which said humanitarian aid would flow and the Palestinians would not needlessly continue to suffer.”
With a majority of the population displaced by two-years of a devastating war, most Gazans now live in tents – many of them makeshift.
They have been clearing up after widespread flooding due to a winter storm that began on Friday.
There are fears that diseases could spread as rainwater has mixed with sewage water.
“My children are already sick and look at what happened to our tent,” said Fatima Hamdona, crying in the rain over the weekend, as she showed a BBC freelance journalist the ankle-deep puddle inside her temporary home in Gaza City.
“We don’t have food – the flour got all wet. We’re people who’ve been destroyed. Where do we go? There’s no shelter for us to go to now.”
The story was the same in the southern city of Khan Younis.
“Our clothes, mattresses and blankets were flooded,” said Nihad Shabat, as she tried to dry out her possessions there on Monday.
Her family has been sleeping inside a shelter made of sheets and blankets.
“We’re worried about getting flooded again. We cannot afford to buy a tent.”
A recent UN report found that across Gaza more than 80% of buildings had been destroyed and 92% in Gaza City.
According to the NRC – which has long led the so-called Shelter Cluster in Gaza, made up of some 20 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – about 260,000 Palestinian families, or about 1.5 million people, are in need of emergency shelter assistance, lacking the basics to get through winter.
The NGOs say they have been able to get only about 19,000 tents into Gaza since the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect on 10 October.
They say they have 44,000 pallets of aid – containing non-food items, including tents and bedding – blocked from entering. Supplies that have been bought are currently stuck in Egypt, Jordan and Israel.
Jan Egeland blames what he calls “a bureaucratic, military, politicised quagmire” running “counter to all humanitarian principles” for the hold-up.
In March, Israel introduced a new registration process for aid groups working in Gaza, citing security reasons. It requires that they give lists of their local Palestinian staff.
However, aid groups say that data protection laws in donor countries prevent them from handing over such information.
Many items, including tent poles, are also classed as “dual-use” by Israel, meaning they have a military as well as civilian purpose, and their entry is banned or heavily restricted.
Cogat, the Israeli defence body that controls the border crossings, told the BBC that “over the last few months” it had coordinated the entry of “close to 190,000 tents and tarpaulins directly to the residents of the Gaza Strip”.
It said that “in accordance with the terms of the agreement” of the ceasefire, it was allowing “hundreds of trucks carrying food, water, fuel, gas, medicines, medical equipment, tents, and shelter supplies [to] enter the Gaza Strip every day, in coordination with the UN, international organizations, donor countries, and the private sector”.
On Sunday, Cogat wrote on X: “We call on international organizations to coordinate more tents and tarpaulins and other winter humanitarian responses.”
It said it was working with the new US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) that had been set up in southern Israel and other international partners to plan “a catered humanitarian response for the upcoming winter”.
International aid groups are hoping that the CMCC – which will oversee implementation of President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan – will help ease restrictions on their work.
With a foreign donor conference on reconstruction in the Palestinian territory expected to take place in Egypt soon, they say basic shelter supplies must be allowed to enter while longer-term plans are developed.
“It would not be a good thing if all these nations meet in Cairo to discuss long-term reconstruction for Palestinians in great need if they die before their high-rise buildings can be reconstructed,” says Mr Egeland, who was previously the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator.
“They need a tent today, they don’t need a promise of a beachfront structure in five years.”
BBC / Titilayo Kupoliyi
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