‘A slow genocide accelerated’: How Gaza’s winter ‘crisis’ is manufactured by Israel

‘A slow genocide accelerated’: How Gaza’s winter ‘crisis’ is manufactured by Israel

Submitted by Katherine Hearst on Wed, 11/11/2026 - 13:41 NGOs and mutual aid groups says tens of thousands of tents lie in warehouses outside Gaza as Israeli restrictions see aid deliveries plummet in October A displaced Palestinian child walks in a partially flooded tent camp during heavy rains in Gaza City, 7 November 2026 (Reuters/Dawoud Abu Alkas) Off

Days ago, baby Ehab Mohammad Hamad was found by his mother, lifeless with blue lips, fingers and toes.

The six-month year old died of exposure after his family’s tent was flooded.

“No matter how hard we tried to keep the child warm and wrap him in blankets, it was all in vain,” the child’s grandmother said in a video posted by the Palestinian-led mutual aid group, the Sameer Project.

The group provided the family with a dome tent. But Hala Sabbah, who works with the organisation, said that the story fell on deaf ears.

“I was really frustrated that it wasn’t talked about,” Sabbah told MEE.

The deaths of Gaza’s babies in freezing, storm-battered tents is now becoming an annual phenomenon in the aid-starved enclave. 

For the fourth winter in a row, rains have swept through Gaza, exposing woefully inadequate supplies of materials for shelter entering the strip.

“There are tens of thousands of tents, winter coats, blankets, pallets and pallets, truckloads full of these things that are simply waiting in warehouses'

- Sean Jones, Unwra

This has forced 65 percent of the population - around 1.4m people - to shelter in makeshift shelters or tents which have been swamped in the downpour, or damaged buildings which risk collapse.

While the weather is turbocharged by a strengthening El Nino event, the paucity of aid is entirely man-made, leveraged as a pressure point by Israel over Gaza’s population.

The Israeli authorities have long restricted the entry of shelter and construction materials into Gaza, with vital equipment like tent poles and mobile homes deemed to be “dual use”.

On Sunday, the UN aid coordination office (Ocha) confirmed that 150,000 tents are prepositioned outside Gaza waiting to be delivered.

“There are tens of thousands of tents, winter coats, blankets, pallets and pallets, truckloads full of these things that are simply waiting in warehouses because they've not received normal approvals by the Israelis to let them in,” Sean Jones, director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) in Gaza told MEE.

“It's part of the trend line we see, a concerted effort just to delay,” he added.

Part of the plan

But in recent months, even fewer pallets of shelter aid appear to be struggling across the border. According to the Palestine Shelter Cluster, the number of trucks carrying shelter and household items into Gaza plummeted from 908 in December 2025, to 409 in January 2026. 

In October, weeks before the storm struck, just nine percent of aid trucks that entered that month carried shelter items.

With the Rafah crossing closed to aid in May, minimal numbers of trucks trickle through the Kerem Shalom crossing, the only route into the territory open to aid.

'This is part of Israel's plan - to push us out, to not let us bring in the aid that we need in order to respond to people'

- Shaina Low, Norwegian Refugee Council 

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reported in early October that the authorities were allowing just 15 trucks carrying dual-use items in one day per week. 

It warned that at the current rate of entry of dual-use items, in a best-case scenario it would take seven months for the winter aid stored in warehouses outside the strip to enter.

An assessment of shelter needs in Gaza by the Shelter Cluster in August this year revealed that an estimated 1.98 million people, 94 percent of the population, were classified in Shelter Severity Phases 3 (Crisis), 4 (Critical), or 5 (Catastrophic). 

It showed that only 10 percent of those surveyed received shelter aid in the month prior to the data collection.

While the needs in Gaza are enormous, humanitarian groups are hamstrung.

In December last year, Israel banned 37 international NGOs, including the NRC, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Oxfam, from operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

While the ban was subject to a temporary injunction, it is still in effect, barring the groups from bringing aid and international staff into the territory.

This and the ban issued against Unrwa - previously the main heavy lifter in terms of shelter provision in Gaza - has meant the majority of shelter aid is brought in bilaterally through committees run by the Egyptian, Qatari, Emirati and Saudi governments.

“The stockpiles inside of Gaza from INGOs are extremely low,” Shaina Low, the NRC’s communication adviser in Palestine, told MEE.

“This is part of Israel's plan to push us out, to not let us bring in the aid that we need in order to respond to people. And so the committees are the ones that seem to be able to get more aid in.”

Not fit for purpose

Due to the reduced footprint of international NGOs on the ground in Gaza, small Palestinian-led mutual aid groups like the Sameer Project have stepped into the void to buy tents on the market and distribute them. 

But scarcity has sent prices soaring. According to the Shelter Cluster, the cost of tents has rocketed by 52 percent, costing $655, while emergency shelter kits have soared by 1,233 percent to $4000.

'There had been a slow genocide throughout 2026, but over the last three to four months, we're seeing acceleration, and this is a part of their strategy'

- Hala Sabbah, Sameer Project

“A lot of tents that come in are stolen and sold on the market,” Sabbah told MEE, adding that tents are distributed to people on lists approved by the Israeli authorities.

“It’s a whole system that’s designed, you have people who are living in homes being allocated tents,” she said.

The quality of the tents has also deteriorated, as Palestinians are forced to reuse old materials.

According to the Shelter Cluster’s August assessment, over 50 percent of Palestinians sheltering in tents are using ones that are in poor or very poor condition. Fifty-four percent of them are using tents or makeshift shelters that they've been in for a year or more. 

“These are materials that only last a few months. The lifespan is really short, especially with the weather conditions in Gaza, and so people are just living in really, really difficult circumstances without access to materials to improve their living conditions,” Low said.

“We're still seeing that supplies that are entering are not necessarily fit for purpose,” she added. “Not all tents are water resistant, which means we need to divert resources like tarpaulins to reinforce them.”

According to Sabbah, many of the tents that are making it over the border appear to be made of an inferior material to previous years and are not water resistant, and require two tarpaulins to be layered over them.

Inseparable from genocide

While Palestinians in Gaza have already endured three winters in threadbare tents, this year, due to the razing of buildings and infrastructure by Israel, they are forced to camp on ever-smaller patches of land.

A spatial analysis by Forensic Architecture revealed that, over the course of the genocide, Gaza’s displaced population has increasingly been forced into low-lying areas on Gaza’s coast. 

As Israel’s expanding "yellow line" swallows up more of the territory, and the fact that much of the land is coated in debris means that they have nowhere else to go.

‘We woke up soaking wet’: Gaza’s displaced face another winter of floods and collapsed shelters Read More »

“The tent camps now flooding are not an incidental feature of this,” Nicola Banks, Forensic Architecture's head of communications, told MEE.

“They occupy the very spaces into which Palestinians have been forcibly concentrated, often on land without the infrastructure needed to sustain life,” she said.

“The floods make visible what our investigation traces spatially, that the destruction of Gaza's built environment and the material conditions of Palestinian existence are inseparable from the ongoing genocide.”

Sabbah said that this year, the team she works with in Gaza are already exhausted, their bodies worn out by the demands of the previous three winters.

“People are taking much more sick leave than they used to in the past,” she said.  

“Their bodies are depleted. It's one thing to face winter in genocide when you're a young healthy man versus someone who has lived in these conditions for four years.

“There had been a slow genocide throughout 2026, but over the last three to four months, we're seeing acceleration, and I think this is a part of their strategy,” Sabbah told MEE.  

“They're not doing something very intense all at once because they don't want backlash from their international community.

“Its a slow genocide, accelerated.”

Israel's genocide in Gaza News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0