LONDON: Jehad Al-Jarbou’s young son danced in the rain, but inside the family’s tent in Gaza City water soaked their clothes and blankets. For the little boy, his mother said, the downpour was a discovery. For Al-Jarbou, a Palestinian visual artist and poet, it exposed how little stood between her family and the harsh effects of the approaching winter. “My son began dancing in the rain but now he is ill because we do not have adequate heating or proper clothes,” she told Arab News. “A little child feels joy when he looks up at the sky and sees the rain. But the rain has drenched everything: his clothes, his bedding and his dreams.” Across Gaza, torrential rain in recent days has flooded displacement camps, ruined bedding and left families patching shelters with whatever salvaged wood and scraps of fabric they can get their hands on. Aid groups have warned that Israeli restrictions on shelter supplies and reconstruction materials have turned foreseeable winter storms into emergencies. The potentially life-threatening danger was made clear on Sunday night when a sand embankment weakened by rain collapsed onto tents in a camp south of Deir Al-Balah, killing a woman and five children, according to media reports and aid organizations. “The number of fatalities is expected to rise,” said Wassem Mushtaha, Oxfam’s response lead in Gaza, on Monday. Describing the conditions as “abhorrent,” he said that “severe flooding has displaced around 100,000 people.” He added: “Israel is restricting access to shelter materials and has rendered 65 percent of Gaza off-limits. People have no safe place to go.” Videos showed men searching beneath boulders, sand and collapsed tents by the light of their phones after the embankment collapsed. Rescue teams were still looking for two missing persons on Monday, Save the Children said, warning that further landslides and collapsing buildings could endanger more families. The organization said the Israeli military control of approximately 70 percent of Gaza had forced much of the Palestinian population into areas ill-equipped to withstand heavy rainfall. The families in Deir Al-Balah had been sheltering in the shadow of the sandbank that gave way. For those whose tents remained standing, the immediate challenge was finding somewhere safe and dry to sleep and provide protection from the next storm. Al-Jarbou said her family had been trying to buy tarpaulins to reinforce their tent, despite high prices of about $100 each. When the first heavy downpour of the season arrived, she sat with her mother, brother and son. The heavy rain persisted for hours, soaking their belongings and washing away the ground around them. Sewage mixed with the rainwater, leaving pools of contamination that were a particular danger to her son. “It’s very difficult to keep a young child from touching the rain when he sees it for the first time,” she said. “The ground is filthy because sewage mixes with the rainwater. Everywhere, there are pools of contaminated water. “Nothing can protect us except being in a proper home. We need mobile homes, not tents.” About 70,000 tents providing shelter for an estimated 350,000 people, including 210,000 children, flooded during 12 hours of torrential rain over the past few days, according to Palestinian media. Save the Children warned that wet shelters and soaked winter clothing were exposing children to the risks of hypothermia and waterborne diseases. More than 2,000 damaged or structurally unsound buildings were also said to be at risk of collapse amid continuing rain and strong winds. Even before the storm, families had few resources left with which to protect themselves, said Elias, an educator from Gaza City whose name has been changed at his request. He described a sudden shift from prolonged heat to fierce winds, heavy rain and bitter cold, which was “making living conditions and health problems far worse.” He told Arab News: “Families in displacement camps could not sleep because of the heavy rain. Their tents were torn apart and thousands collapsed or flooded, along with the bedding laid on the ground.” Tens of thousands of people were now trying to repair the damage to their only shelter with worn-out fabric, poor-quality timber and metal salvaged from bombed homes, he said. “I wish I could advise my loved ones to start digging caves and sheltering in them, as people did in medieval and prehistoric times, to experience that way of life while the rest of the world lives in the age of space exploration and technology,” Elias said. “I don’t even know if the pieces of cloth that are sheltering displaced families deserve to be called tents at all,” he added, because the use of the word obscured how little protection they offered and “serves as a label that absolves the world’s governments and international institutions of responsibility.” Aid organizations said emergency repairs might ease the immediate suffering but could not replace safe housing and functioning infrastructure. Teams from Oxfam were working to maintain drainage networks, supply sandbags and repair tools, clear sewer blockages and drain floodwater from displacement sites, Mushtaha said, but they urgently needed spare parts, engine oil, pipes, heavy machinery and more shelter materials. “Israel’s ongoing genocide has resulted in the near collapse of all functioning systems in Gaza,” he said. He called on governments to “insist that Israel allows for unimpeded access to recovery and repair materials to restore essential infrastructure and ensure Palestinian-led reconstruction efforts across Gaza.” Save the Children said restrictions on deliveries of aid and reconstruction materials left people with few options to prepare for further storms. “Four children who should have been safe and warm with their families instead lost their lives in an entirely preventable way,” said Ahmad Alhendawi, the organization’s regional director for the Middle East, referring to the children killed in the embankment collapse. “Their deaths are a heartbreaking reminder that for children in Gaza, even bad weather can become deadly. Rain did not kill these children; they were killed by man-made conditions created by the Israeli authorities, forcing families to live in unsafe, inadequate shelters with nowhere else to go. “Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly warned that without sufficient shelter materials and winter supplies, children would be put at risk. Those warnings are now being borne out in the most devastating way possible.” “The international community cannot allow more children to die in disasters that are entirely foreseeable. No more families have to bury their children because of a storm.” Gaza’s Civil Defense urged international organizations to provide safe shelters and move tents away from slopes, sandy areas and other locations at risk of collapse, the BBC reported. But for families living under flimsy canvas, finding safer ground does not solve the problem of staying warm and dry. Shireen Munir Ma’aruf, 24, a mother of two who is pregnant with her third child, was living in a tent in western Gaza City after being displaced from Beit Lahiya. She told the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that she feared what lay ahead. “Winter hasn’t even started yet and my tent and everything inside is flooded,” she said. “What will I do when the worst of it hits?”