Gazing into the Abyss: Winter's Grim Arrival in Gaza

Tue Nov 18 2025 04:34:47 GMT+0200 (Eastern European Standard Time)

With heavy winter rains now inundating Gaza, aid agencies warn of a looming humanitarian crisis, as displaced families struggle for survival in damaged shelters. The bleak reality is underscored by calls for urgent international assistance.

As winter rains commence in Gaza, over 250,000 families are urgently calling for assistance, facing the devastating effects of flooding amidst a backdrop of destroyed infrastructure. Aid organizations, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, express dire warnings that many lives, especially those of children, are at grave risk without immediate support. Current barriers to humanitarian aid worsen the situation, with only a fraction of requested supplies having reached the region. The urgent plea for assistance highlights the escalating humanitarian crisis faced by an already vulnerable population.

Aid agencies have reiterated calls for Israel to allow more tents and urgently needed supplies into Gaza after the first heavy winter rainfall, saying more than a quarter of a million families need emergency help with shelters.

We are going to lose lives this winter. Children, families will perish, says Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

It's actually so frustrating that we've now lost so many crucial weeks since the adoption of the Trump peace plan, which said humanitarian aid would flow and the Palestinians would not needlessly continue to suffer.

With a majority of the population displaced by two years of a devastating war, most Gazans now live in tents - many of them makeshift.

They have been clearing up after widespread flooding due to a winter storm that began on Friday.

There are fears that diseases could spread as rainwater has mixed with sewage water.

My children are already sick and look at what happened to our tent, said Fatima Hamdona, crying in the rain over the weekend, as she showed a BBC freelance journalist the ankle-deep puddle inside her temporary home in Gaza City.

We don't have food - the flour got all wet. We're people who've been destroyed. Where do we go? There's no shelter for us to go to now.

The story was the same in the southern city of Khan Younis.

Our clothes, mattresses and blankets were flooded, said Nihad Shabat, as she tried to dry out her possessions there on Monday.

Her family has been sleeping inside a shelter made of sheets and blankets.

We're worried about getting flooded again. We cannot afford to buy a tent.

A recent UN report found that across Gaza more than 80% of buildings had been destroyed and 92% in Gaza City.

According to the NRC - which has long led the so-called Shelter Cluster in Gaza, made up of some 20 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - about 260,000 Palestinian families, or about 1.5 million people, are in need of emergency shelter assistance, lacking the basics to get through winter.

The NGOs say they have been able to get only about 19,000 tents into Gaza since the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire took effect on 10 October.

They say they have 44,000 pallets of aid - containing non-food items, including tents and bedding - blocked from entering. Supplies that have been bought are currently stuck in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.

Jan Egeland blames what he calls a bureaucratic, military, politicised quagmire running counter to all humanitarian principles for the hold-up.

In March, Israel introduced a new registration process for aid groups working in Gaza, citing security reasons. It requires that they give lists of their local Palestinian staff.

However, aid groups say that data protection laws in donor countries prevent them from handing over such information.

On Sunday, the Israeli defense body COGAT stated that they had coordinated with the international community to facilitate close to 140,000 tarpaulins directly to the residents of Gaza Strip.

International aid groups are hopeful the establishment of a US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center will help ease restrictions, as a foreign donor conference for reconstruction is planned in Egypt.

However, aid organizations stress that immediate shelter supplies are vital now to prevent loss of life this winter.

“They need a tent today, they don't need a promise of a beachfront structure in five years, underscores Egeland.