At night, amid heavy rain and plummeting temperatures, Heba and Ehab Ahmad tightly held their two youngest children, relying on their body heat and a thin blanket to keep them warm while the water and a gust of wind blew holes in their makeshift tent.
“We don’t have anything to keep us warm and dry,” said Ms. Ahmad, 36. “We live in conditions that I never thought possible in my entire life.”
The Ahmad family is among the 1.9 million Gazans the United Nations says have been displaced since Israel began a relentless bombing campaign and expanded ground operations in retaliation for attacks on Israel on October 7, which led by Hamas.
They arrived in Gaza’s southern Al-Mawasi neighborhood three weeks ago, when winter set in. The family of seven took shelter in a small, flimsy tent they built using overpriced nylon sheets and some wooden planks, Mr. Ahmad said, 45 They shared it with 16 other relatives, he added. .
“It’s not a proper 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 maintain a small fire, which they use to cook and stay warm. “I am talking to you while the smoke from the fire is blinding me,” Mr. Ahmad said in a telephone interview on Sunday. In the background, someone can be heard coughing uncontrollably. “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, which has a shortage of clean water and unsanitary those conditions. Children are the most severely affected by the increasing number of infectious diseases, according to UNICEF.
The only daughter and youngest child of Mr. and Ms. Ahmad, Jana, 9, has been suffering from severe abdominal pain for about two weeks, possibly due to severe dehydration, Mr. Ahmad said. He said, he has not yet taken it to a hospital or clinic because the few medical centers that remain functional are completely overwhelmed and difficult to reach by foot.
“He was screaming in pain, and all we could do was give him rainwater to drink,” Mr. Ahmad said.
It was hot weather when the Ahmads and their five children first fled their home in the northeastern city of Beit Hanoun in the early days of the war. Like many others, Ms. Ahmad, they did not expect to be lost for so long and fled with only a few documents and warm clothes on their backs.
“I would look for warm clothes in second-hand street markets,” says Mr. Ahmad, “but they sell them for crazy prices that I can’t afford.”
“For 23 days, we tried to find sheets and mattresses,” Mr. Ahmad said. “We sleep on a thin blanket and shape the sand as a kind of pillow to rest our heads on.”
This week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an international collaboration of aid organizations, classified the entire population of Gaza as being 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 eat whatever they can get, mostly wild leafy vegetables, Mr. Ahmad said. He added that so far no help has reached them. Aid distribution has been complicated by fuel shortages, ongoing airstrikes and many other logistical challenges.
However, there is a silver lining to the rainy season – a brief respite from the family’s daily struggle to find water.
They put a bucket outside their tent to collect rainwater, which they use to cook and wash themselves and their clothes.
“It’s still contaminated water,” he said, “but we have no other alternative. We have to adapt.”
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.