“We have nothing to keep us warm and dry.” Winter adds to Gaza’s misery

At night, amid heavy rains and plunging temperatures, Heba and Ehab Ahmad held their two youngest children tightly, relying on their body heat and a thin blanket to keep them warm as water and gusts of wind blew through the holes in their makeshift tent .

“We have nothing to keep us warm and dry,” said Ms. Ahmad, 36. “We live in conditions that I never dreamed were possible in all my life.”

The Ahmad family is among the 1.9 million Gazans the United Nations says have been displaced since Israel began its brutal bombing campaign and expanded its ground operation in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

They came to Gaza’s southern Al-Mawasi neighborhood three weeks ago, just as winter was setting in. The family of seven took shelter in a small, flimsy tent they built using overpriced nylon sheets and a few wooden planks, said Mr Ahmad, 45 years old. They share it with 16 other family members, he added.

“It’s not even a real tent,” he joked. “Those who stay in real tents are the bourgeois in Gaza.”

During the day, Mr. Ahmad said, he and his eldest sons try to find firewood and cardboard to keep a small fire going, with which they cook and stay warm. “I am talking to you while the smoke from the fire blinds me,” Mr. Ahmad said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Someone could be heard coughing uncontrollably in the background. “The smoke also hurts our lungs,” he added.

The UN and other rights groups have expressed growing concern in recent days about the further spread of water-borne diseases such as cholera and chronic diarrhea in Gaza, with the lack of clean water and unsanitary conditions. Children are the most affected by the increasing number of infectious diseases, according to UNICEF.

Mr. and Mrs. Ahmad’s only daughter and youngest child, Jana, 9, had been suffering from severe abdominal pain for almost two weeks, possibly due to extreme dehydration, Mr. Ahmad said. He said he has not been able to take her to a hospital or clinic because the few medical centers that are still functioning are completely overwhelmed and difficult to reach on foot.

“She is screaming in pain, and all we can do is give her some of the rainwater to drink,” Mr Ahmad said.

The weather was warm when the Ahmads and their five children first fled their home in the northeastern city of Beit Hanoun during the first days of the war. Like many others, Ms Ahmad said, they had not expected to be away for so long and had fled with only a few documents and the summer clothes they had on their backs.

“I started looking for warm clothes at second-hand markets,” Mr. Ahmad said, “but they are selling them at crazy prices that I can’t afford.”

“We have been trying to find blankets and mattresses for 23 days,” Mr Ahmad said. “We slept on a thin sheet and formed the sand into a kind of pillow to rest our heads.”

This week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an international partnership of aid agencies, classified the entire population of Gaza as in crisis in terms of access to food.

Like many other displaced families, the Ahmads, who have moved four times since the war began, have struggled to find food and water. They ate whatever they could get their hands on, especially wild leafy vegetables, Mr Ahmad said. He added that no help had been reached so far. Aid distribution has been complicated by fuel shortages, persistent airstrikes and a host of other logistical challenges.

However, there is a silver lining to the rainy weather: a brief respite from the family’s daily struggle to find water.

They placed a bucket outside their tent to collect rainwater, which they used for cooking and washing themselves and their clothes.

“It’s still polluted water,” he said, “but we have no other alternative. We have to adapt.”

Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.