A sand embankment overlooking a camp for displaced families south of Deir al-Balah collapsed on Sunday during heavy rains and high winds, killing five people — including an eight-year-old, a six-year-old, and their mother. Three tents were buried completely. Witnesses described breaking boulders with hammers to reach victims. The children's father survived only because he was outside the tent when the collapse occurred, seconds after one of his children had called him in to eat. The immediate cause was weather. The structural cause is that 2.3 million people are living in tent encampments and bombed-out ruins with no reconstruction underway two years into a ceasefire process that has produced no withdrawal agreement. The UN reported more than 26,000 households suffered damage to shelters or belongings from the weekend's rainstorms alone. The Hamas-run government media office said approximately 70,000 tents were flooded on the first day of rains. The shelter crisis is compounded by Israel's restrictions on materials it classifies as "dual use." Metal tent poles remain blocked. Humanitarian workers have resorted to fashioning wooden poles from palettes used to transport food. An earlier assessment by shelter specialists found that tents supplied by China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia offered only limited protection against rain and wind — the precise conditions that triggered Sunday's deaths. Cogat, the Israeli defence ministry body overseeing aid to Gaza, said more than 91,000 tents and over 8,200 trucks of tarpaulins, blankets, and winter clothing had reached Gaza, along with fuel and engine oil for pumping facilities. Mustafa Qazzaat of the Gaza City council countered that Israel had not permitted prefabricated homes since the truce was announced, allowing only limited numbers of tents. The US-brokered ceasefire called for eventual reconstruction, but negotiators remain deadlocked. Israel conditions reconstruction on Hamas disarming; Hamas has not agreed. Israel's forces control approximately two-thirds of the territory from which residents have been ordered to leave. Unicef spokesperson Toby Fricker called the collapse predictable: "[Gaza] is extremely overcrowded. People are just trying to find a place wherever." The survivor Abdul Karim al-Sahhar, originally from Izbat Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, said his tent and all his possessions were buried. "My mattress, household utensils and all my belongings — everything was buried. I could not retrieve anything." He and his family are now homeless within a territory where homelessness is the baseline condition. This is not a natural disaster story. It is a story about what happens when millions of people are confined to improvised shelter on unstable terrain with restricted access to construction materials, no reconstruction timeline, and no political resolution in sight. The sand bank did not fail. The system designed to keep people in tents on sand banks failed.
