The arrival of the first winter rains in the Gaza Strip has become a new element of anxiety for the population of Gaza. After two years of the Israeli offensive, most of the two million residents are displaced in precarious tents exposed to the elements. Now, the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 13,000 families are “affected” by rain that fell heavily early Friday morning and has since reappeared intermittently. The UN has described this situation as “one misery after another” in a territory affected by war, famine, destruction and pollution.
The storm transformed the tent cities for displaced people built among the rubble in Khan Yunis (south of the enclave) or in Gaza City (north) into a field of mud and puddles. The first floods triggered fears of the spread of gray water and diseases, including potentially fatal ones Guillain-Barré syndromepresent in Gaza, in an area where Israeli missiles have destroyed water and sanitation networks.
They also exacerbated the destruction of existing resources. The Gaza government’s press office said Friday that 93% of the enclave’s 135,000 tents are uninhabitable, leaving residents of a territory with 320,000 homes destroyed without alternatives, according to OCHA. A humanitarian representative of this agency told EL PAÍS on Monday that thousands of families have seen the water flood or break their tents, or cause the loss of the goods they brought with them after two years of conflict.
This is a predictable humanitarian tragedy. Gaza sees rain every year when autumn arrives. Humanitarian organizations present in the Strip have been reporting for months that the materials linked to the refuge that entered the enclave during the previous truce – between January and March 2025 – were deteriorating rapidly in a context of permanent hostilities and subsequent forced displacements ordered by Israel.
Despite this, between the start of the truce – October 10 – and early November, Israeli authorities allowed only 7,000 tents through the UN-led humanitarian system, according to Shania Low, communications advisor for the Palestinian mission of the Norwegian Refugee Council, the group leading the refugee cluster in Gaza.
The second phase of the peace plan
The UN Security Council will vote this Monday at 11pm. (Spanish Peninsular time) on a proposed resolution sponsored by the United States calling for a mandate from the United Nations to implement the resolution key elements of the second phase envisaged in the peace plan for Gaza sponsored by Donald Trump. But Hamas and other Palestinian factions issued a statement this Monday morning, refusing to meet their main demands.
The White House text calls for legitimizing a governance model supervised by the “Peace Board” that Trump will preside over for two years, which can be extended. That junta, whose members are unknown, would maintain power over Gaza until the Palestinian Authority – which currently governs parts of the West Bank – completes undetailed reforms. This lack of specificity extends to much of the proposal, which lacks parameters that measure success or that put into a temporal sequence the different objectives 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 calls for the ISF to demilitarize Gaza, and requires it to do so in coordination with Israel and Egypt, which is met with pushback from several Arab countries, which refuse to participate in a mission that could be seen as reinforcing the Israeli occupation.
“Palestinian factions (as they are called in the Hamas-led statement) have warned of the risks” of that proposal, establishing what they see as “international safeguards over Gaza and the promotion of a biased pro-occupation vision.” They indicate that the text “paves the way for external domination of Palestinian national decision-making” and “deprives” Palestinians of managing “their own affairs,” such as the reconstruction of the Strip.
Hamas and other groups clearly express their “rejection” of the disarmament called for by the draft resolution, until there is a process that ensures “the end of the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state”. During a meeting with the security cabinet on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu also disputed one of the ambiguities of the proposal – which requires a future “credible path” to Palestinian statehood under conditions that are difficult to meet – and stressed: “Our rejection of a Palestinian state remains in place.”
Defenseless against winter
The appearance of the first showers while the Israeli authorities maintain humanitarian restrictions – which contravenes the truce agreement – leaves the inhabitants of Gaza defenseless. Stéphane Dujarric, a United Nations spokesman, complained from New York on Friday that thousands of families are “totally exposed to the harsh conditions of winter” while “millions of shelter-related and urgently needed products 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 accumulations of contaminated water that appear in the middle of refugee 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 a meeting point for rainfall, gray water and waste.
“This pond is now a time bomb for residents,” Hosni Muhanna, spokesperson for the Gaza City municipality, said in a video broadcast Sunday on France 24. “If the pond overflows, the surrounding areas could be subject to sewage overflow.”
“Most of the tents were submerged in water or flooded,” Suleiman al Sirswai, an elderly Gaza City resident displaced in a camp in that city, told 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 colds in December. In February, various sources, including the Patient’s Friends Charitable Hospital in Gaza City, mentioned the deaths of six more people in the space of a few days. Medical teams warned that those who died did not die from previous illnesses and that their deaths were linked to their families’ failure to keep them warm.
Aid workers say, on condition of anonymity, that around 20 infants and young children died from the cold last winter. Some of them were a day or two old.
