Heavy winter rains swept across the Gaza Strip for a second straight day on Thursday, flooding hundreds of tents and deepening the humanitarian emergency for families already displaced by two years of devastating war.
What began as steady predawn drizzle escalated into hours of unbroken rainfall, overwhelming Gaza’s fragile displacement camps – sprawling clusters of makeshift shelters that now house more than 1.9 million people.
By sunrise, the storm had carved channels of brown water through the camps, pooling in low-lying areas and swallowing entire rows of tents.
Families scrambled to stack belongings on crates and plastic buckets, but the floodwaters rose faster than they could move.
In Rafah, the epicenter of Gaza’s displacement crisis, residents described scenes of panic and exhaustion as the storm intensified.
