Nearly all of the flimsy tents in Palestinian displacement camps have been rendered unusable due to the harsh winter conditions.
A new storm is forecast to hit Gaza, adding further to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in makeshift tents in displacement camps that are already unfit to withstand the harsh winter weather.
Israel’s more than two-year genocidal war has forced nearly all of Gaza’s two million people from their homes to live in these temporary shelters.
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Last week, Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that 127,000 of the 135,000 tents in displacement camps have been rendered unusable because of the recent extreme weather.
“The reality on the ground tells a very painful and grim story,” said Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Gaza City on Monday.
“Hundreds of thousands of displaced families are still living in torn tents and roofless homes exposed to the rain and cold, and the freezing nights.”
This suffering is directly caused by Israeli restrictions, said Abu Azzoum, as Israel has not been allowing the “entry of prefabricated mobile housing units and the building materials that are essential for winter protection” or a free flow of desperately needed basic humanitarian aid.
Under a United States-brokered ceasefire, which took effect on October 10, and which Israel has violated hundreds of times on a near-daily basis, aid deliveries were supposed to be significantly ramped up, with at least 600 trucks a day due to enter Gaza to fulfil the population’s needs.
However, the Government Media Office says only an average of 145 trucks have been entering Gaza since the ceasefire.
In an attempt to ease their abject misery, Palestinians have been “improvising by reinforcing their makeshift tents with plastic sheets, by keeping themselves fully clothed and burning scraps inside the makeshift tents in order to use them for heating due to the unaffordability of fuel supplies and heating mechanisms along the Strip,” said Abu Azzoum.
Winter in Palestine can be “very brutal”, but what makes this one even worse is that it comes on top of months of “displacement, hunger and exhaustion”, he added.
The harsh winter conditions have also caused the collapse of previously damaged buildings by relentless Israeli bombing, leading to the deaths of at least 25 people since mid-December, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
“The elderly people, the sick and the children are among those who are most affected” by the harsh winter conditions, said Abu Azzoum.
Deaths caused by cold exposure have risen to 24, including 21 children, the Government Media Office reported last week.
“All the victims were displaced Palestinians living in forced displacement camps,” it said in a statement.
A Palestinian Civil Defence spokesperson in Gaza said last week that hospitals across the territory have been observing an influx of patients, particularly children, with cold-related illnesses, and the organisation had received hundreds of calls for support due to extreme cold.
The Palestinian Meteorological Department has warned of the risk of frost and freezing conditions in a polar air mass across large parts of Palestine on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.