Thousands without shelter face lethal conditions in storm-hit Gaza as they wait for 150,000 tents

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been left in waterlogged and damaged tents after deadly storms at the weekend, while 150,000 new shelters are held outside Gaza awaiting Israeli approval to enter, aid agencies have said.

At least four Palestinian children and woman were killed as heavy rains and wind battered fragile, leaky tents. Thousands have been left without shelter and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed, with sewage spewing into people’s tents.

“All our clothes were soaked. My kids are all sick and I can’t afford to buy them more clothes,” said Raed Jamal, a displaced Palestinian. “Watching them suffering in the cold is heartbreaking.”

“These conditions are so difficult, the whole night I had to use pots to collect rainwater because it was falling on us.”

He shared videos with the Guardian of his tent shaking in the wind as rain poured through holes in its roof.

Aid workers warn disease will spread rapidly unless families are quickly supplied with new shelters and ways to keep warm.

The UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians said it was concerned about a rise in health problems because families were living in flooded tents with nowhere else to go.

“Our medical teams expect to see more respiratory illnesses and other health complications linked to cold, damp and overcrowded conditions, and we fear more children could die from hypothermia, as happened last winter,” said Mai Elawawda, MAP’s communications officer in Gaza.

According to the UN, 940,000 people in Gaza are in areas at risk of flooding in makeshift tents without protection from heavy rainfall. The flooding threat has been heightened as facilities for pumping out storm water are not operating due to a lack of power.

Shelterbox, a charity working in humanitarian crisis zones, said the tents it usually supplies during emergencies have been waiting outside Gaza for almost two years and it has instead been forced to improvise shelters built from tarpaulins and wooden pallets. But even these materials, it says, are being restricted.

“The latest devastating floods impacting displaced people in Gaza demonstrate exactly why more durable improvements to shelter are desperately needed ahead of winter,” said a Shelterbox spokesperson.

“The over-reliance on emergency solutions, rather than building shelters from more robust materials, means that many people are living in shelters that are simply not suitable to withstand the weather conditions that the region experiences and will quickly deteriorate.”

A child drowned in flood waters and at least three children and their mother died when a sand dune fell on their tent at the weekend, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The UN said 26,000 households had sought its help after the rains and at least 3,900 households were now without shelter at all.

Palestinians in Gaza are facing their second winter since a ceasefire was agreed more than a year ago, but aid workers said conditions were no better than last year because of Israeli restrictions on “dual-use items” and backlogs at crossings were limiting critical supplies to build shelters.

“It’s very difficult to deal with it because there’s also there’s no clear process for things. There’s a level of capriciousness that one day toolkits will be allowed in, another day toolkits will not and they don’t say why,” said Sheltherbox the spokesperson.

The Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) has called on the British government to pressure Israel to allow supplies into Gaza and reverse restrictions on humanitarian workers, including restoring the licences of dozens of organisations, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

“The predictable winter rains and floods have, as warned about, battered already devastated Palestinians, where disease and malnutrition is rife, and a basic tent blocked by Israel is a manmade and political scarcity,” said Caabu’s head of parliamentary affairs, Joseph Willits. “A lack of political action isn’t something a Palestinian family trying to shelter from Gaza’s floods can afford.”

Israel claimed last week to have allowed 10,000 tents into Gaza, but that falls far short of the number needed – the UN said 150,000 were waiting outside Gaza for entry for the estimated 94% of Palestinians in Gaza who need help finding shelter.

The Israeli NGO Gisha, which lobbies for goods and people to be able to enter and exit Gaza more freely, said the Israeli authorities had enforced stricter limits on goods entering Gaza than in previous ceasefires.

While the Israeli authorities claim to be allowing an average of 600 trucks into Gaza each day, they count 12 pallets of goods as a single truck, even though a truck usually carries about 20 pallets – which could amount to about a 40% reduction on what could be carried into Gaza. Gisha has also accused Israeli authorities of a lack of transparency on what is being allowed to enter Gaza.

Nour al-Batsh, the mother of a seven-month-old child, said she was forced to rent a partially destroyed apartment she shares with others for $500 a month, relying on donations from abroad, after her tent collapsed.

“The cold is lethal. Living in a tent by the sea means facing the constant threat of death from the freezing temperatures,” said Batsh, who can see her old tent from her current shelter. “We are still in autumn, and winter has not even properly begun. I look at my fragile tent and I beg God that I will not have to go back to it. Because death inside that tent is certain.”