Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – As the downpour grew heavier, 65-year-old Abu Sajed scrambled to position buckets and pots around his cramped room in central Gaza.
The stone walls and tarpaulin roof of his makeshift dwelling, located east of Salah al-Din Street near the “Yellow Line” in the Bureij refugee camp, provided scant shelter from the storm.
“We couldn’t stay in bed because of the heavy rain. We crowded onto chairs in the one corner the water hadn’t reached yet and waited for it to stop,” recalled Abu Sajed, who lives with diabetes.
When he groped in the dark for his blood glucose monitor, he found it soaked through and useless.
The solar power system that his household relied on for lighting and phone charging had been damaged as well. Water also poured into his daughter’s neighbouring tent, drenching her clothes and possessions and ruining the inverter tied to her solar setup.
“I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t protect myself, let alone my family. Even reaching the toilet had turned into an ordeal because of all the water,” he said.
His troubles didn’t end with the rain. The next morning, as he tried to leave the room, he slipped on the muddy floor and fell. Too weak to rise on his own, he had to be hauled up by his wife and daughter.
“I felt helpless and drained,” he said.
The recent rainfall has compounded Gaza’s hardships. Under Israel’s siege, the vast majority of residents have no proper housing to fall back on.
But the consequences reach far beyond flooded rooms and ruined belongings. The storms also endanger the energy sources people count on, at a time when Gaza’s electricity crisis shows no sign of easing.
In a room inside a shelled building in northern Gaza, Mohammed al-Hour harnesses sunlight to recharge residents’ phones through his solar system. Yet rainwater still trickles in through the fractured walls and shattered ceiling above him.
“People come to me just to charge their phones for a while, so they’ll have light at night. But when the clouds linger and the sun vanishes, even that becomes impossible,” he said. “Whether you’re in a tent or a house, the rain finds a way in. The bombing has left almost nothing intact.”
Firms working to keep the lights on are themselves being overwhelmed by the destruction.
Even with winter preparations in place, the Abu Zayed Electricity Company could not stop water from breaching several of its facilities, damaging equipment and knocking generators offline. It was forced to halt operations at affected branches over fears of electrical contact and short circuits.
Aya Shaheen, the company’s general manager, explained that distribution panels and electricity metres had been wrapped in plastic sheeting and tarpaulins, exposed wiring had been insulated, and municipalities had been asked to drain standing water. The scale of the damage, she said, simply outstripped what resources were available.
“No matter how much we prepare and how hard we work to shield our equipment, we keep running into serious obstacles because so much infrastructure has been destroyed,” she said. “The municipalities are stretched to the limit too. Flooded tents demand urgent attention, so they can’t answer every plea for help.”
Water still found its way into one of the company’s sites, Shaheen noted, even though its generators sit inside purpose-built prefabricated shelters. Depending on the extent of the damage, getting service back and repairing the equipment can take anywhere from hours to days.
According to UNICEF, the recent rains have affected more than 106,000 people. Around 950,000 displaced people are living in areas prone to flooding, among them 400,000 in especially high-risk zones.
A joint assessment by the World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union found that 80 percent of the enclave’s electricity generation and distribution assets were destroyed or put out of commission during the war. The result is a drastic curtailment of reliable power, made worse when solar output falls on overcast days and equipment grows susceptible to water damage.
Mohammed Abu Khaled, an engineer who specialises in energy systems and equipment for the health sector, cautions that when rainwater infiltrates solar installations it can wreck batteries and inverters, triggering short circuits and corrosion of electronic circuitry.
“The inverter is the weakest point and the part most prone to failure. It houses delicate circuit boards that are rarely shielded well enough against water,” he said.
He estimated that faults in household solar systems and those powering displacement camps jumped by more than 40 to 50 percent after the recent rains. Fixing a broken inverter can run between $200 and $500, and families may have no choice but to replace an entire battery if it is ruined.
Solar panels themselves can see their output plunge by 60 to 80 percent on cloudy days, he added, which slows battery charging and shortens the hours a household can lean on stored power.
The danger grows more acute when rainwater reaches hospital equipment, especially since so many health facilities have been compelled to operate out of prefabricated units and temporary buildings that offer little defence against the elements.
Abu Khaled warned that fierce winds and torrential rain can allow water to seep into hospital wards, leaving operating-room equipment, portable oxygen generators, vital-signs monitors, laboratory instruments and lighting systems exposed to moisture and damage.
Some equipment has already fallen victim to the damp, he said, piling further strain on clinics that are already scraping by with severely limited resources.
As the rain keeps falling, Gaza’s residents are heading into yet another winter with almost no infrastructure to shield them and few means to replace the belongings and equipment they have lost.
With water seeping into their shelters, electricity systems on the brink of collapse and medical equipment growing ever more vulnerable, the weather is heaping one more burden on families fighting to preserve the most basic conditions for survival amid the wreckage.