As Palestinians in Gaza prepare for two more days of storms, heavy rains, and flooding, ActionAid urgently calls for the opening of border crossings and for more aid to enter Gaza.
Alaa AbuSamra, Emergency Response Programme Manager, ActionAid Palestine, in Gaza, said:
“The suffering in Gaza is relentless. The bombs may have lessened, but the pain has not. It has simply changed shape. Now the suffering falls from the sky as freezing rain. Floods rip through tents. Storms batter families who have nothing left to lose. Gaza has become a hellscape where every new month brings a new way to struggle or die.
I am a parent. I have children. And like every displaced mother and father in Palestine, I am terrified that the cold will succeed where the bombs failed.
I have stood in flooded camps and watched families dig channels with their bare hands to stop water from reaching their children at night. I have seen mothers and children forced to remain awake all night, standing in freezing floodwater inside their tents, without electricity, without heat, and without the strength left to do anything more. I have listened to parents describe wrapping their children in plastic sheets because there are no blankets left.
This is not survival with dignity. This is people are being forced to endure the unendurable. This must stop. A ceasefire is not real if airstrikes continue and aid is blocked, with people left to freeze. Several children died in the previous winter, and several have already died this winter, too. Families need proper shelter so they can survive the winter and do so with dignity. The terms of the ceasefire must be upheld, that means allowing shelter items to enter Gaza, stopping the reliance on expensive commercial goods, and letting humanitarian organizations deliver aid at scale.
Today, because supplies are blocked, a single shelter costs more than $1,000 on the market. That is an impossible price in a place where people have lost everything. This is not a shortage; it is a decision. And these decisions are costing lives.”
ENDS
Spokespeople available for interviews:
- Alaa AbuSamra, Emergency Response Programme Manager, ActionAid Palestine
- Jamil Sawalmeh, Country Director of ActionAid Palestine
- Riham Jafari, Advocacy and Communications Coordinator at ActionAid Palestine
For media requests, please email christal.james@actionaid.org or call 7046659743.
For further data on access to aid and winterization, please review the Ceasefire Now humanitarian snapshot.
About ActionAid
ActionAid is a global federation working with more than 41 million people living in more than 71 of the world’s poorest countries. We want to see a just, fair, and sustainable world, in which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity, and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty. n which everybody enjoys the right to a life of dignity, and freedom from poverty and oppression. We work to achieve social justice and gender equality and to eradicate poverty.
