Shelters plea for Gazans as winter rains raise fears of more disease and death

BBC:

Aid agencies have reiterated calls for Israel to allow more tents and urgently needed supplies into Gaza after the first heavy winter rainfall, saying more than a quarter of a million families need emergency help with shelters.

“We are going to lose lives this winter. Children, families will perish,” says Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

“It’s actually so frustrating that we’ve now lost so many crucial weeks since the adoption of the Trump peace plan, which said humanitarian aid would flow and the Palestinians would not needlessly continue to suffer.”

With a majority of the population displaced by two-years of a devastating war, most Gazans now live in tents – many of them makeshift.

They have been clearing up after widespread flooding due to a winter storm that began on Friday.

There are fears that diseases could spread as rainwater has mixed with sewage water.

“My children are already sick and look at what happened to our tent,” said Fatima Hamdona, crying in the rain over the weekend, as she showed a BBC freelance journalist the ankle-deep puddle inside her temporary home in Gaza City.

“We don’t have food – the flour got all wet. We’re people who’ve been destroyed. Where do we go? There’s no shelter for us to go to now.”