AhlulBayt News Agency: Gaza’s Civil Defense announced on Sunday that two people have died since the beginning of the latest winter storm striking the Gaza Strip, as severe weather worsens the humanitarian crisis for displaced families.
Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal reported that a child drowned after falling into a water-filled pit in the al-Sudaniya area north of Gaza City, while a woman was killed when a wall collapsed on her tent near Gaza’s port.
Basal explained that hundreds of displacement tents were flooded or destroyed by strong winds and heavy rain, even though the current storm is less intense than previous ones, further aggravating the suffering of displaced families.
He added that Civil Defense teams received hundreds of emergency calls related to flooding and managed to respond to dozens of cases in shelters and across different parts of the enclave.
Basal urged international organizations to act urgently to allow the entry of construction materials and proper shelter supplies, stressing that simply providing tents is no longer sufficient under current conditions.
Strong winds and heavy rainfall have inundated large numbers of tents and swept others away, worsening the plight of tens of thousands of Palestinian families living in dire humanitarian conditions.
Earlier Civil Defense data indicated that storms hitting Gaza since December have caused the deaths of 17 Palestinians, including four children, while flooding has affected about 90 percent of shelters housing displaced people whose homes were destroyed by Israel.
Figures from the Government Media Office showed that weather damage has impacted more than 250,000 displaced people out of approximately 1.5 million Palestinians living in fragile tents and shelters offering little protection.
Since Saturday afternoon, Gaza has been facing its third polar low-pressure system this winter, compounding the hardship of hundreds of thousands of displaced residents living in vulnerable shelters amid widespread destruction of infrastructure.
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