What Is Unfolding in Gaza Is Devastating

By Ibrahim al-Khalili
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Gaza

For thousands of displaced families in Gaza, winter has arrived not as a season, but as another layer of suffering.

Here in Deir el-Balah, the rain has turned temporary refuge into a fresh disaster. Tents are collapsing under the weight of wind and water. The cold is unbearable. Families who have already been displaced multiple times now find themselves with nowhere left to go.

What is unfolding is devastating.

This is not merely a storm. It is a new wave of displacement—one that has come even after the war has stopped. Flooding has forced families to abandon the fragile shelters they struggled to build from scraps of plastic and fabric. Many people here tell me that a new war has begun, one fought not with bombs, but with rain, cold, and exhaustion.

This time, people are running not because of airstrikes, but because of fear—the fear that the ground beneath them will give way, that the water will rise, that their children will not survive the night.

The suffering is relentless. Families are battling grief, hunger, illness, and exposure all at once. Each obstacle compounds the last, leaving people trapped in conditions that grow harsher by the day.

They are not only surrounded by water—they are drowning in grief.

And still, they endure.