Thousands of displacement tents were inundated overnight and early on Monday in various areas of Deir Al Balah and Khan Younis in southern Gaza, following heavy rainfall that swept across the region.
The Government Media Office in Gaza reported that displaced individuals endured a harrowing night in tents overwhelmed by rainwater and battered by strong winds during a storm that began on Sunday evening.
Yahya Al Batran woke up in the early hours of Sunday to find his wife, Noura trying to wake their newborn twin sons Jumaa and Ali as they lay together in the makeshift tent the family occupied in an encampment in the central Gaza Strip.
Intense winter cold and heavy rain across the coastal enclave in previous days had made their lives a misery but what he heard was more serious.
“She said she had been trying to wake Jumaa up, but he was not waking up, and I asked about Ali and she said, he was not walking up either,” he told Reuters.
“I held up Jumaa, he was white and freezing like snow, like ice, frozen.” Jumaa, a month old, died of hypothermia, one of six Palestinians who have died of exposure and cold over recent days in Gaza, according to doctors. Ali was in critical condition on Monday in intensive care.
In the second winter of the war in Gaza, the weather has added an extra element of suffering to hundreds of thousands of people already displaced, often multiple times, while efforts to agree a ceasefire go nowhere.
The death of Jumaa Al Batran shows how severe the situation facing vulnerable families remains. Israeli authorities say they have allowed thousands of aid trucks carrying food, water, medical equipment and shelter supplies into Gaza.
International aid agencies say Israeli forces have been hampering aid deliveries, making the humanitarian crisis even worse.
Yahya Al Batran’s family, from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, fled their home early in the war for Al Maghazi, an open air patch of dunes and scrubland in central Gaza which Israeli authorities decreed as a humanitarian zone.
Later on, as Al Maghazi became increasingly unsafe, they moved to another encampment in nearby Deir Al Balah city.
“Since I am an adult I may take this and endure it, but what did the young one do to deserve this?” Jumaa’s mother, Noura al-Batran said. “He could not endure it, he could not endure the cold or the hunger and this hopelessness.”
TATTERED TENTS
Around the area, dozens of tents, many already tattered from months of use, have been blown away or flooded by the strong winds and rain, leaving families struggling to repair the damage, patching torn sheets of plastic and piling up sand to hold back the water.
It is another aspect of the humanitarian crisis facing Gaza’s 2.3 million population, caught by the relentless Israeli campaign against the remnants of Hamas and dependent on an erratic aid system increasingly vulnerable to looting as order has broken down.
The office highlighted that two million displaced persons are living under catastrophic humanitarian conditions caused by the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, which has persisted for 451 days. The conflict has completely destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, forcing people to seek refuge in tents that lack basic necessities.
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