Severe winter storm batters Gazans left with no defenses

A severe winter storm with winds and heavy rains has killed more than a dozen people across the Gaza Strip, inundating its low-lying coast, flooding thousands of tents and collapsing buildings already shaken by two years of Israeli bombardment.

Fourteen people died by Friday as a result of the storm, according to the Gaza Interior Ministry, including an eight-month-old infant who died of hypothermia after a surge of water filled her family’s tent.

Oudia Awdi, a resident of Jabalya in northern Gaza, said he learned at dawn Friday that his uncle, Abdul Raouf Badran, and Badran’s wife and several of his children had been killed. They had sought shelter under a building that was previously damaged in an airstrike.

“As the storm raged, the rest of the [damaged building] fell on them,” Awdi said. “We thought that we survived the missiles; now nature does not have mercy on us either.”

Just one of Badran’s children survived the collapse, Awdi said.

The storm, which swept across the Mediterranean Sea this week, laid bare the immense humanitarian challenges in Gaza and underscored what aid agencies have said is a dire need for better tents and more shelter materials.

“Thousands of UNRWA trucks loaded with tents, blankets and food have been waiting at Gaza’s entry points for weeks,” Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, said in a statement Thursday. He called the situation a “humanitarian tsunami” and blamed Israel for restricting key supplies.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration said Friday that it had sent more than 1 million shelter items to Gaza, including waterproof tents and thermal blankets.

“Yet these supplies cannot withstand flooding,” the IOM said in a statement, adding that tool kits, sandbags and water pumps have all been held up because of long-standing restrictions on the entry of construction items.

The branch of the Israeli military that controls aid flows to Gaza said it had facilitated the entry of nearly 270,000 tents and tarpaulins over the last few months.