At least six people were killed in Gaza after a powerful rainstorm flooded makeshift camps, tore tents from the ground, and exposed displaced families, including young children, to freezing conditions, health officials said.
Medics said five people, including two women and a young girl, were killed when homes sheltering displaced families collapsed near Gaza City’s coastline, while a toddler died of hypothermia inside a tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
Among the dead were three members of the same family – Mohamed Hamouda, 72, his granddaughter, 15, and daughter-in-law – who were killed when an 8m-high wall collapsed onto their tent during high winds in a coastal area of Gaza City, medics reported.
At least five people were injured in the collapse.
The storm, driven by strong winds and heavy rainfall, swept across Gaza overnight, flooding hundreds of tents and leaving families scrambling to secure whatever little remained. Some tents were ripped from their stakes and thrown dozens of metres, while others collapsed into muddy pools.
Relatives gathered on Tuesday morning to clear rubble from the collapsed wall and rebuild tent shelters for the surviving family members.
“We didn’t realise what was happening until the wall started collapsing,” Bassel Hamouda told Reuters after the funeral for his relatives.
“Because of the speed and force of the wind, the wall fell on top of us, onto three tents.”
In other areas of Gaza City, people tried to reinforce remaining shelters by hammering pegs back into the ground and stacking sandbags around tents to keep floodwaters out.
Dozens of families were seen salvaging belongings washed into the Mediterranean Sea.
Saeed Saadallah, 65, a Gaza City resident whose tent was swept away into the water, said his family of 10 had nowhere else to go.
“The sea is hitting us, the wind is hitting us, the rain is hitting us,” he told the news agency, pointing towards the shoreline where clothing and bedding had been lost.
Three months after a ceasefire halted major fighting, Israeli forces have ordered the near-total depopulation of almost two-thirds of Gaza, pushing more than two million people into a narrow coastal strip. Most displaced families are living in fragile tents or heavily damaged buildings.
Local officials said the response to the storm was hampered by fuel shortages and destroyed equipment. Municipal and civil defence teams said many vehicles, including bulldozers and water pumps, had been damaged or destroyed during the war, leaving them unable to cope with flooding.
The Gazan government’s media office said at least 31 Palestinians had died since the start of winter due to exposure to cold or the collapse of unsafe structures damaged by earlier Israeli air strikes.
The health ministry said the toddler in Deir al-Balah was the seventh person to die from hypothermia since winter began, including a newborn just seven days old and a four-year-old girl whose deaths were reported earlier this week.
Temperatures in Gaza typically hover around 12C in winter and can fall to between 10C and 15C at night, conditions that become life-threatening for infants and elderly people living in thin plastic shelters.
The UN said at least 300,000 new tents were urgently needed for the roughly 1.5 million people still displaced. In December, a UN report warned that hundreds of displacement sites were at high risk of flooding.
“In Gaza, winter weather is adding to the suffering of families already pushed to the brink,” UNRWA said, warning that cold, flooding and damaged shelters were exposing displaced people to new dangers while humanitarian access remained constrained.
Israel says hundreds of aid trucks enter Gaza daily, carrying food, medical supplies and shelter materials, though international aid groups say the supplies remain insufficient.
This is Gaza’s third winter since Israel launched a war on the besieged territory in October 2023.
