KHAN YUNIS: It only took a matter of minutes after the heavy overnight rain first began to fall for Jamil al-Sharafi’s tent in southern Gaza to flood, drenching his food and leaving his blankets sopping wet.

The winter rains have made an already precarious life worse for people like Sharafi, who is among the hundreds of thousands in the Palestinian territory displaced by the war, many of whom now survive on aid provided by humanitarian organisations.

“My children are shivering from cold and fear… The tent was completely flooded within minutes,” Sharafi, 47, said on Sunday.

“We lost our blankets, and all the food is soaked,” added the father of six, who lives in a makeshift shelter with his children in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi.

Insufficient aid

Nearly 80 per cent of buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged by the war, according to United Nations data.

UNRWA chief says supplies not being allowed in ‘at the scale required’

And about 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.2m residents have lost their homes, said Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza.

Of more than 300,000 tents requested to shelter displaced people, “we have received only 60,000”, Shawa told AFP, pointing to Israeli restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid into the territory.

The UN refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, said the harsh weather had compounded the misery of Gazans.

“People in Gaza are surviving in flimsy, waterlogged tents & among ruins,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X.

“There is nothing inevitable about this. Aid supplies are not being allowed in at the scale required.”

Earlier this month, Gaza experienced a similar spell of heavy rain and cold. The weather caused at least 18 deaths due to the collapse of war-damaged buildings or exposure to cold.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2025