The arrival of the Gaza Strip has become a new element of anguish for the Gazan population. , most of the two million residents are displaced in precarious tents vulnerable to inclement weather. Now, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 13,000 families are “affected” by the rainfall that fell heavily early Friday morning and has reappeared intermittently since then. The UN has described this situation as “one misery upon another” in a territory hit by war, famine, destruction and pollution.
The storm has turned the tent camps for the displaced population that are built among rubble in Khan Yunis (south of the enclave) or Gaza City (north) into an expanse of mud and puddles. The first floods have triggered fears of the spread of gray water and diseases – such as the potentially deadly one present in Gaza – in a territory where Israeli missiles have destroyed water and sanitation networks.
They have also exacerbated the destruction of existing resources. The Gaza Government’s press office stated on Friday that 93% of the 135,000 tents in the enclave are uninhabitable, leaving a territory with 320,000 homes destroyed, according to OCHA. A humanitarian representative of that agency told EL PAÍS this Monday that thousands of families have seen the water flood or break their tents, or cause the loss of the belongings they kept with them after two years of conflict.
This is a foreseeable humanitarian tragedy. Gaza sees rain every year when autumn arrives. Humanitarian organizations present in the Strip have been denouncing for months that the materials linked to the shelter that entered the enclave during the previous truce – between January and March 2025 – were deteriorating at high speed in a context of permanent hostilities and successive forced displacements ordered by Israel.
Despite this, between the beginning of the truce – on October 10 – and early November, the Israeli authorities only allowed the entry of 7,000 tents through the humanitarian system led by the UN, according to Shania Low, communications advisor for the Palestinian mission of the Norwegian Refugee Council, the group that leads the refuge cluster in Gaza.
The second phase of the peace plan
The UN Security Council will vote this Monday at 11:00 p.m. (Spanish peninsular time) on a proposed resolution promoted by the United States that seeks a United Nations mandate to execute the . But Hamas and other Palestinian factions issued a statement this Monday morning, refusing to comply with their main demands.
The White House text calls for legitimizing for two extendable years a governance model supervised by the “Peace Board” that Trump would preside over. That junta, whose members are unknown, would maintain power over Gaza until the Palestinian Authority — which currently governs parts of — completes undetailed reforms. This lack of specificity extends to a good part of the proposal, which lacks parameters that measure success or that order in a temporal sequence the different goals it proposes, such as the withdrawal of the Israeli army, the disarmament of Hamas or the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF, for its acronym in English).
The US proposal provides for the ISF to demilitarize Gaza, and requires it to do so in coordination with Israel and Egypt—something that clashes with the refusal of several Arab countries, which refuse to participate in a mission that could be seen as reinforcing the Israeli occupation.
“The Palestinian factions (as they are called in the statement led by Hamas) warned about the risks” of that proposal, by establishing what they consider “international guardianship over Gaza and the promotion of a biased vision in favor of the occupation.” They indicate that the text “paves the way for external domination over Palestinian national decision-making,” and “deprives” the Palestinians of managing “their own affairs,” such as the reconstruction of the Strip.
Hamas and the rest of the groups make clear their “rejection” of the disarmament demanded by the proposed resolution, as long as there is no process that ensures “the end of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian State.” On Sunday, during a meeting with the security cabinet, Benjamin Netanyahu also challenged one of the ambiguities of the proposal – which calls for a future “credible path” towards the Palestinian state amid conditions that are difficult to comply with – and emphasized: “Our rejection of a Palestinian state remains in force.”
Defenseless against winter
The appearance of the first showers while the Israeli authorities maintain – something that contravenes the truce agreement – leaves Gazans defenseless. Stéphane Dujarric, UN spokesman, lamented on Friday from New York that thousands of families are “totally exposed to the harsh conditions of winter” while “millions of products linked to shelter and urgently needed remain stranded in Jordan, Egypt or Israel, awaiting approval to enter Gaza.”
Among the supplies mentioned by Dujarric are equipment to drain water from tents or from accumulations of contaminated water that appear in the middle of displaced persons camps. In the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, a pond that before the war was used to collect rainwater and transport it to the sea has become the meeting point between precipitation, gray water and garbage.
“This pond is today a time bomb for residents,” said Hosni Muhanna, spokesman for the Gaza City Municipality, in a video broadcast on France 24 on Sunday. “If the pond overflows, the surrounding areas could face sewage overflow.”
“Most of the tents have been submerged under water or flooded,” Suleiman al Sirswai, an elderly resident of Gaza City displaced in a camp in that city, told the Qatari network Al Jazeera. “You don’t know what to do to help yourself or to help those around you.”
Everything seems to indicate that Gaza is entering a winter that threatens to resemble the previous one. In 2024, the UN recorded the deaths of eight newborns from cold during the month of December. In February, various sources—including the Patient’s Friends Charitable Hospital in Gaza City—mentioned the death of another six within a few days. The medical teams warned that those who died did not do so because of previous illnesses, and that their deaths were related to the inability of their families to keep them warm.
Aid workers say on condition of anonymity that around 20 babies or toddlers died from the cold last winter. Some of them were one or two days old.
