Heavy rains flood thousands of precarious tents in Gaza and worsen the humanitarian crisis

Heavy rains are wreaking havoc for the fourth consecutive year in Gaza where hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents, because Israel is preventing the reconstruction promised by the ceasefire signed in October 2025. From early Friday to Saturday, water has been falling intensely in the area, causing floods that have flooded up to 70,000 tents and demolished buildings weakened by Israeli bombing, according to data provided by the Hamas Government. The Civil Defense—in charge of care and rescues—claims to have received at least 1,500 emergency calls. He has not been able to attend to all of them.

In the images of Palestinian journalists (Israel has prevented the press from free entry to Gaza since 2023), you can see shops with the floor covered in water and mud, as well as families desperately trying to empty them with whatever. Also mattresses, completely wet clothes and large puddles between the tents.

An unidentified elderly woman told the Al Jazeera network in ankle-deep water how the water had washed away everything they had and moistened the flour they kept in a large bag to make bread. “Clothes, medical products... It's our house and there's nothing left,” he lamented.

The flooding has been a matter of hours, particularly since Saturday, in an example of the precarious situation of the Gazans. Some 400,000 displaced by the Israeli invasion live poorly in places considered “highly vulnerable” to floods. The Civil Defense estimates that there are more than 2,000 buildings at risk of collapse and at least 300,000 tents necessary for displaced people to face these weather conditions.

Families whose shelters have been flooded have also gone 48 hours without receiving food aid, according to Al Jazeera. The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has issued a message in which it claims to be “distributing emergency supplies and providing other support to affected families,” but clarifying that “available stocks are insufficient.” “Months of funding shortfalls and restrictions have severely limited preparations,” he adds.

Jonathan Veitch, the representative in Gaza of Unicef, the UN agency dedicated to children, has released a video from inside the Strip in which he explains that the rivers of rainwater mix when they fall with sewage, with the consequent danger to health in a territory where infections, insects and even rodents proliferate due to the living conditions to which it is subjected. The Hamas Government in Gaza estimates that the storm has caused damage worth three million dollars (almost 2.7 million euros).

If the term natural disaster is already the target of criticism from experts, it applies even less in this case. More than a year ago, Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire, promoted by President Donald Trump, through which the Islamist movement handed over its last hostages (living and dead) and marked the end of the war and the beginning of reconstruction as “immediate.”

Israel, however, has killed more than 1,600 Palestinians in those thirteen months and has been preventing reconstruction, with the connivance of the Trump Junta, which oversees the ceasefire. It is prohibiting the entry of mobile shelters, prefabricated housing and containers. It also restricts tent access.

The reason is that the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Junta condition troop advances and withdrawals on the prior complete and verified disarmament of Hamas. Reconstruction in the part it controls (where virtually the entire population lives, more than two million people) is thus paralyzed. And hundreds of thousands remain in tents.