Anas al-Shami, 33, lives with his family of six in a tent metres from the sea near al-Qarara port on Gaza's coast. He ended up there after fleeing Bani Suheila in eastern Khan Younis when Israel designated it a "Yellow Zone" barring Palestinian presence. Overcrowding and rental costs in displacement areas made alternatives impossible. Last winter, seawater and rain flooded the tent while his children slept, soaking bedding and belongings repeatedly. The family has spent the entire year unable to find safer shelter. Ibrahim Abu Tair, 47, shares a similarly wrecked tent on the same shoreline with his seven children, also displaced from eastern Khan Younis. He describes the helplessness of watching his children endure cold, wind, and the threat of rising waves with no winter clothing and no dry mattress. Last year's flooding forced the family into the open. His single request is safe shelter where his children can sleep without fear. The Mayasem Association, working with World Central Kitchen, has devised a stopgap: damaged cooking pots filled with earth, stacked three high to roughly 150 centimetres, forming barriers against encroaching seawater. The pots, rendered unusable by fire damage and corrosion, are donated by World Central Kitchen. The initiative started by protecting the association's education and cultural programme space and expanded to shielding displaced families' tents along the coast. It is resourceful improvisation born of absolute deprivation. Gaza's Winter Emergency Committee has issued stark warnings. Israeli authorities continue to block the entry of tents, caravans, critical construction materials, and fuel into the Strip. Israeli forces have destroyed approximately 70 percent of municipalities' essential operational equipment and 90 percent of civil defence rescue equipment. The fuel crisis means remaining machinery and generators will soon cease functioning, eliminating the capacity to respond to floods, conduct rescues, or clear roads. The committee reports roughly 200,000 dilapidated tents sheltering hundreds of thousands of displaced people, including children, women, and people with disabilities. Some 7,800 tents sit in extremely hazardous zones — dry riverbeds prone to flooding, rainwater collection ponds, and beaches exposed to winter waves. About 2,000 cracked buildings at risk of collapse also shelter families. Building materials, caravans, shelter, and fuel are all urgently needed. The structural dynamics are clear: Israeli military operations create the displacement, Israeli blockade policy prevents the materials needed for alternative shelter, and the destruction of municipal and civil defence infrastructure eliminates local response capacity. Families are pushed to the most dangerous locations precisely because every safer option has been either destroyed, overcrowded, or priced out of reach. The pot-barrier innovation underscores the gap — when your best flood defence is a stack of broken cookware, the system has failed at every level. This is not a natural disaster story. It is a manufactured shelter crisis where the displacing force simultaneously controls the supply of shelter materials. The 20-year trajectory, if this pattern holds, is permanent displacement infrastructure — a population housed in hazardous temporary structures with no pathway to durable shelter, where each winter compounds health damage and each military operation resets the displacement cycle.
