Just when things seemed at their worst in Gaza: Palestinian man carries a body bag through waist-deep water as FLOODS wreak havoc across bomb-ravaged territory

His face etched with grief, this Palestinian man struggles to carry the body of a child killed in an Israeli airstrike through flood waters rising to his waist.

The man is among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who are now not only having to contend with a relentless Israeli bombardment but also flooding that is wreaking havoc across the territory.

Cold winter rain and strong winds lashed war-torn Gaza overnight on Wednesday – compounding the suffering of those forced to leave their homes and now huddling in flooded tents.

Exhausted parents who have fled to Rafah in the south have tried in vain to get the rainwater out of their tents while their children – sick from the cold – huddle in the corner.

In one harrowing scene, video shows a man wading through waist-height flood water while carrying a child’s body wrapped in cotton as the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza was pounded with rain. 

In another video, paramedics waded through the flood water to rescue an injured woman who was trapped inside an ambulance. A paramedic can be seen lifting her over his shoulder and trudging through the muddy water.

Temperatures dropped again overnight as the heavy rain and winds tore and ripped through the flimsy tents in southern Rafah, forcing hundreds of Palestinian families to sleep under plastic sheets. 

Aziza al-Shabrawi, 38, tried in vain to get the rainwater out of her family’s tent as her two children huddled inside. 

‘My son is sick because of the bitter cold and my daughter is barefoot,’ Shabrawi says. ‘It’s like we’re beggars. No one cares, and no one helps.’

Shabrawi is among some 1.9 million people displaced during more than two months of war, half of them children, with many fleeing to southern Rafah following orders from the Israeli military.

She was forced first to leave her home in the northern Jabalia refugee camp, reaching the southern city of Khan Yunis, only to flee further to Rafah as Israeli troops pressed deeper into Gaza.  

The southern city near the Egyptian border has become a vast camp for the displaced, with hundreds of tents erected using wood and plastic sheets. 

‘We spent five days outdoors. And now the rain has flooded the tents,’ said Bilal al-Qassas. Gusts of wind shook the fragile structures, while people tried to reinforce them with more plastic sheeting.

‘Where do we migrate to? Our dignity is gone. Where do women relieve themselves? There are no bathrooms,’ said 41-year-old Qassas.

‘We’ve started to long for martyrdom. We don’t want to eat or drink.’ 

Yasmin Mhani said she had woken up in the night to find her youngest child, who is seven months old, soaking wet. 

Her family of five are sharing a single blanket after their home was destroyed by an Israeli air strike and they lost one of the children, as well as all their possessions.

‘Our house was destroyed, our child was martyred and I remain facing it all. This is the fifth place we have had to move to, fleeing from one place to another, with nothing but a t-shirt on,’ she said, hanging wet clothes outside her tent.

In the central city of Deir al-Balah, the storm brought cold winds and flooded a shelter area behind a hospital, sending torrents of water coursing between the tents. ‘The situation is catastrophic,’ said Ibrahim Arafat, a father of 13 who fled Shijaiyah.

Meanwhile, Bilal Abu Bakr, who fled from the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp, said he has no electricity or internet access to check the weather forecast.

‘Suddenly, we were inundated by rainwater,’ said the 49-year-old. ‘We only have one blanket for nine people. We ask for the minimum – some mattresses, blankets, clothes for the displaced.

‘We’ve forgotten the suffering of war, and we are now suffering from winter and the freezing cold, for how long?’

The cold and wet conditions coupled with a lack of shelter and food, doctors and aid workers say it is inevitable epidemics will rip through Gaza as disease festers. 

‘The perfect storm for disease has begun. Now it’s about, ‘How bad will it get?” James Elder, chief spokesperson for the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF), said.

Israel’s air and ground assault, launched in response to Hamas’ unprecedented attack into southern Israel on October 7 where 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered, has killed more than 18,600 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.

But despite the rising death toll and mounting international calls for a ceasefire, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night vowed to keep fighting in Gaza until it crushes Hamas. 

It comes after Hamas terrorists carried out one of the deadliest single attacks on Israeli soldiers since the Gaza invasion began, killing at least nine in an urban ambush in a sign of the stiff resistance Hamas still poses despite more than two months of devastating bombardment.

The ambush in a dense neighbourhood came after repeated recent claims by the Israeli military that it had broken Hamas’ command structure in northern Gaza, encircled remaining pockets of fighters, killed thousands of militants and detained hundreds more.

The tenacious fighting underscores how far Israel appears to be from its aim of destroying Hamas – even after the military unleashed one of the 21st century’s most destructive onslaughts. 

But Netanyahu vowed to keep fighting in Gaza until his forces have destroyed Hamas.

‘We are continuing until the end, there is no question,’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Wednesday. ‘I say this even given the great pain and the international pressure. Nothing will stop us.’ 

Today, Israel continued to bomb Gaza overnight, with the strikes killing at least 67 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

US President Joe Biden, whose government has provided Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, delivered his sharpest rebuke of the war on Wednesday. He said Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ of Gaza was eroding international support.

But Netanyahu vowed to carry on ‘until victory, nothing less than that’, and Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said the war would continue ‘with or without international support’.

On Thursday, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was due in Jerusalem for talks with Netanyahu and his war cabinet, a sign of the US pressure.

Sullivan told a Wall Street Journal event ahead of his trip that he would discuss a timetable to end the war and urge Israeli leaders “to move to a different phase from the kind of high-intensity operations that we see today”.

Netanyahu has said there is also “disagreement” with Washington over how Gaza would be governed after the war.

Qatar-based Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said on Wednesday that “any arrangement in Gaza or in the Palestinian cause without Hamas or the resistance factions is a delusion”.

CNN reported, citing US intelligence, that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions used by Israel in Gaza since October 7 have been unguided, which can pose a greater threat to civilians. 

International pressure is mounting on Israel to better protect non-combatants. This week, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly supported a non-binding resolution for a ceasefire.

While Washington voted against, the resolution was supported by allies Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In a rare joint statement, the three countries said they were “alarmed at the diminishing safe space for civilians in Gaza”.

The UN estimates 1.9 million out of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced.

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, said on Wednesday that Gazans were “facing the darkest chapter of their history”.

He said they are “now crammed into less than one-third” of the territory, and hinted there could be an exodus to Egypt, “especially when the border is so close”.

The UN warned the spread of diseases – including meningitis, jaundice and upper respiratory tract infections – had intensified.

Fewer than one-third of Gaza’s hospital are partly functioning, the UN says, and Hamas authorities said vaccines for children have run out, with “catastrophic health repercussions”.

The World Health Organization called for the “protection of all people inside” Kamal Adwan hospital in north Gaza. The Hamas-controlled health ministry said Israeli forces had opened fire on wards of the facility.

The army has yet to comment, but Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using hospitals, schools, mosques and vast tunnel systems beneath them as military bases – charges it denies.

Major Keren Hajioff, an Israeli military spokesperson, on Thursday said troops had found “weapons depots and tunnels in multiple schools”, as well as a rocket-propelled grenade training facility “inside a mosque in Jabalia.”

The terrorists have continued to fire rockets from Gaza towards Israeli territory.