The winter rains have finally arrived in Gaza, bringing new challenges for the besieged exclave’s 2.3 million people who have already suffered through six weeks of war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
After a warm and dry autumn, a Mediterranean thunderstorm broke across the 25-mile by 7-mile (41km x 12km) strip early on Tuesday morning. The rain washed away the grey rubble dust from airstrikes that clings to buildings in every neighbourhood, and dispersed the smoke and fire from the most recent overnight bombings. Water consumption in Gaza has fallen by 90% since the conflict started, according to the latest data from the UN, and many families rushed outside to enjoy the respite from the unseasonable humidity.
“It cleared the smoke from the air and the sky was beautiful … Today is a new day,” Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian-British surgeon, said in a post on X.
Initial relief at the rainfall quickly dissipated, however, as children began to shiver in wet clothes, while makeshift accommodation flooded and churned-up roads and open land turned to mud.
Two-thirds of Gaza’s population are estimated to have fled their homes due to intense bombing by Israeli forces and a three-week-old ground invasion that has killed an estimated 11,200 people, according to the Hamas-run local health ministry. The war, sparked by Hamas attacks on Israeli communities on 7 October, is already the bloodiest in the 75-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“My kids enjoyed the rain at first, my daughter went out to wash her hair,” said Saleh al-Omran, from the central town of Deir al-Balah, who has moved his family to his wife’s sister’s house after their home was damaged by an airstrike. “We don’t have any way to heat the house. It is getting cold,” he added.
An estimated 600,000 people are sheltering in schools and other public buildings in the southern half of Gaza after fleeing when the Israeli army ordered those living in the northern part of the strip to move south to “safe zones”. Those areas have still been bombed, and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday that it was struggling to provide basic services. Its fuel supplies may run out by Wednesday, the agency said, forcing a halt to most aid operations and the supply of food and medicine through Egypt’s Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only link to the outside world.
According to an Associated Press reporter, people at a tented camp outside a hospital in Deir al-Balah on Tuesday struggled to make their way through muddy conditions as they stretched plastic tarps over flimsy tents.
“All of these tents collapsed because of the rain,” said Iqbal Abu Saud, who had fled Gaza City with 30 of her relatives. “How many days will we have to deal with this?”
Disruption to sewage pumping and water shortages have already caused a rise in waterborne diseases, bacterial infections and diarrhoea among infants, the WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris told reporters in Geneva. “Rain will just add further to the suffering,” she said.
More storms are expected over the next week or so as temperatures drop to 17C and winter sets in. The weather is also likely to affect the fighting as mud hinders the movement of Israeli weaponry.
One man at a UN shelter told Al Jazeera that the humanitarian situation was becoming even more urgent. “If our children do not die from war, they will die from the cold of winter and hunger,” he said.
