The extreme cold exacerbates the tragedy of the displaced Palestinians

Gaza (agencies)

In a tent of cloth and plastic set up in the open in the south of the city of Rafah, Ismail Nabhan sits with his children and grandchildren in front of a fire to get some warmth. The cold is extreme, and the tent struggles with the strong winds in an attempt to withstand.
Nabhan, 60 years old, says: “Two days ago, the winds were strong. We tried all night to attach the nylon to the tent. We live in a desert, and the sea is in front of us. It is doubly cold.”
The tent in which 28 people live emits a foul smell due to burning firewood and pieces of plastic, and choking smoke fills the place.
Raeda Awad, Ismail Nabhan’s wife, says: “The smoke we inhale from burning plastic burns our chests.”
The family's tent, which was displaced from the central Gaza Strip, is one of thousands of displaced persons' tents created in the south of the besieged Strip. It is hundreds of meters away from the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, in the far southwest of the city of Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Beside her, her grandson coughs. Raeda Awad, 50 years old, says: “All the children are sick from the smell and the cold. They do not stop coughing and runny noses. The clothes are not heavy enough to keep them warm.” She added: “The covers are barely enough. Every three people share one cover.”
Raida asks her son Hatem to bring some firewood, and says: “The firewood is wet. We will need four days to dry it, enough for a day or two to heat and cook for thirty people. The situation is tragic.”
According to the United Nations, the number of displaced people in the Gaza Strip is 1.9 million, out of a population of 2.4 million in the Strip before the war.
The United Nations Humanitarian Aid Agency (OCHA) said in its report yesterday that the shortage includes “one million and 200 thousand blankets and mattresses, at least 50 thousand family tents prepared for the winter and 200 thousand pieces of winter clothing, in addition to tarpaulins and plastic sheets.”
In Rafah, Muhammad Kahil, displaced from the northern Gaza Strip, says: “We have no food, water, or heating, and we are freezing to death.”
Haneen Adwan, 31 years old, a mother of six children, was displaced from the Nuseirat camp in the central Strip to Rafah. “At night, I feel that we will die from the cold. We are all sick, suffering from colds and coughs.”
Adwan, whose tent is hundreds of meters from the sea, places three mattresses on top of each other to avoid the cold.
She says: “There is no means of heating other than fire, but the price of firewood is high and we do not have money, and we light the fire with plastic, suffocating from the smell.”
Sitting next to her is her 14-year-old son, Fadi, who is responsible for providing plastic to light the fire. The boy says, pointing to his hands, which are dyed black: “I go there near the sewage ponds, and there is plastic underneath the sand. I dig and cut the plastic every day with a knife.” ».
He says, not caring about the wounds that cover his hands as a result of this work: “My brothers die from the cold at night, and I do too. We must light something or else we will freeze.”
In a nearby tent, Khaled Faraj Allah, 36 years old, prepares bread for his family of six children, including a child with special needs. Faraj Allah, who was displaced from his home east of Gaza City, bakes loaves of bread in the corner of the tent and hands them to his son.
The father refers to his child, “Sanad,” with regret. He says: “He was interacting and laughing, but he became always silent and did not move, especially since he was sick all the time due to a cold and did not get medication.”