Key facts
- At least four Palestinians, including children and a woman, were killed in weekend storms, aid agencies and the health ministry said.
- The UN said 150,000 tents are waiting outside Gaza for entry, while Israel says it allowed 10,000 in last week.
- The UN said 26,000 households sought its help after the rains and at least 3,900 are without shelter.
- Sanitation infrastructure was destroyed and flooding threatens 940,000 people, the UN said.
Heavy rain and wind battered Gaza's tent camps at the weekend, leaving tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians in damaged shelters and killing at least four people, including children and a woman, according to aid agencies and the Palestinian health ministry.
A child drowned in flood water, and at least three children and their mother died when a sand dune fell on their tent, the Palestinian health ministry said. Sanitation infrastructure was destroyed and sewage flowed into tents, the aid agencies said.
The UN said 26,000 households had sought its help after the rains and at least 3,900 households were without shelter. It said 940,000 people in Gaza live in areas at risk of flooding, where storm-water pumping is unavailable because of a lack of power.
Israel said last week it had allowed 10,000 tents into Gaza. The UN said 150,000 were waiting outside for entry, for the estimated 94% of Gaza's population needing shelter help. The charity Shelterbox said its emergency tents had waited outside for almost two years and it had improvised shelters from tarpaulins and wooden pallets.
Medical Aid for Palestinians, a UK-based charity, said its teams expected more respiratory illness and warned that children could die from hypothermia, as happened last winter. Mai Elawawda, a communications officer for the charity, said families were living in flooded tents with nowhere else to go.
The Israeli NGO Gisha said authorities had enforced stricter limits on goods entering Gaza than in previous ceasefires. It said Israel counts 12 pallets as one truck while a truck usually carries about 20, a difference it said could amount to about a 40% reduction in goods carried.
Roofed by a tarpaulin, Nour al-Batsh, the mother of a seven-month-old, said the collapse of her tent forced her to rent a partially destroyed apartment for $500 a month, paid for with donations from abroad. Speaking from shelter, she said winter had not properly begun and that returning to the tent would mean certain death. Raed Jamal, a displaced Palestinian, said rain fell through holes in his tent roof and he spent the night collecting water in pots.