The first winter storm of the season swept across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, flooding thousands of tents and driving displaced families out into the cold and wet.

Gaza's civil defence service said it fielded roughly 1,500 calls for help within ten hours of the rain starting early in the day. In several shelter sites the water rose by around a foot, and some shelter centres were swamped entirely, leaving the people inside with nowhere to go. A spokesman warned that premature babies, the elderly and the sick face the greatest danger.

The weather also brought down structures already damaged during the war that began in October 2023. Rescuers cleared residents from a partly collapsed building in Nuseirat in central Gaza, and in the north a wall gave way under the rain, injuring two people. Images from camps in Gaza City, Khan Younis and Deir el Balah showed families wading through floodwater, bedding soaked through and children standing barefoot in mud and sewage.

In al Mawasi on the southern coast, where more than 900,000 displaced people are sheltering, rain had fallen through the night. Over 125,000 families along the shoreline are considered at particular risk of losing their tents to the sea. Local officials say more than a million displaced people now face the winter, and that the territory urgently needs about 200,000 tents together with heating supplies.

Emergency crews say they have almost nothing to hand out. The head of civil defence in Gaza governorate said his teams do not hold a single tarpaulin or tent and can only focus on saving lives.

Aid groups blame Israeli limits on shelter materials. A Palestinian NGO coordinator said only about 180 to 200 lorries enter each day, well below the 600 agreed under the ceasefire's humanitarian terms, and only around 40 of them carry aid. He said some 50,000 tents are waiting on the Egyptian side of the border and urged action before, rather than after, the next flood.