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It was about 8:30 PM on a Thursday when I headed back home in Gaza City. A strong wind was blowing, making it impossible to remain any longer, leaving me to walk. Initially, it was merely a soft rain, but after about 200 metres the rain intensified abruptly. It came as no shock. I paused beside a tent, trying to warm my hands to fight off the chill. A young boy was sitting outside selling baked goods. We shared brief remarks as I waited, but his attention was elsewhere. I saw the cookies were hastily covered in plastic, already soggy from the drizzle, and I wondered if he’d manage to sell them all before the night ended. The freezing temperature invaded every space.

A Journey Through a Landscape of Tents

While traversing al-Wehda Street in Gaza City, canvas structures flanked both sides of the road. There were no voices from inside them, just the noise of rain pouring down and the moan of the wind. Rushing forward, attempting to avoid the rain, I turned on my mobile phone's torch to light my way. I couldn't stop thinking to those taking refuge within: What are they doing now? What thoughts fill their minds? How do they feel? The cold was piercing. I envisioned children curled under damp covers, parents adjusting repeatedly to keep them warm.

When I opened the door to my apartment, the icy doorknob served as a subtle yet haunting reminder of the suffering faced across Gaza in these severe cold season. I entered my apartment and felt consumed by the guilt of enjoying a dry home when a multitude remained unprotected to the storm.

The Darkness Escalates

In the middle of the night, the storm reached its peak. Outside, makeshift covers on damaged glass billowed and tore, while tin roofing broke away and fell with a clatter. Overriding the noise came the sharp, panicked screams of children, piercing the darkness. I felt completely helpless.

During recent days, the rain has been incessant. Chilly, dense, and propelled by strong winds, it has soaked tents, flooded makeshift camps and turned open ground into mud. In different contexts, this might be called “poor conditions”. In Gaza, it is lived with exposure and abandonment.

The Cruelest Season

Residents refer to this time of year as al-Arba’iniya; the fourty most severe days of winter, commencing in late December and continuing through the end of January. It is the real onset of winter, the moment when the season unleashes its intensity. Ordinarily, it is faced with preparation and shelter. Now, Gaza has no such defenses. The chill penetrates through homes, streets are vacant and people merely survive.

But the danger of winter is now very real. On the Sunday morning before Christmas, recovery efforts recovered the bodies of two children after the roof of a shelled home collapsed in northern Gaza, saving five more people, including a child and two women. Two people remain missing. Such collapses are not the result of fresh strikes, but the result of homes weakened by months of bombardment and ultimately defeated by winter rain. Earlier this month, a young child in Khan Younis succumbed to exposure to the cold.

A Life in Tents

Walking past the camp nearest my home, I saw the consequences up close. Inadequate coverings strained under the weight of water, mattresses were adrift and clothes were perpetually moist, incapable of drying. Each step highlighted how fragile these shelters were and how close the rain and cold came to taking life and health for countless individuals living in tents and overcrowded shelters.

The majority of these individuals have already been uprooted, many repeatedly. Homes are destroyed. Neighbourhoods leveled. Winter has arrived in Gaza, but shelter from its fury has not. It has come lacking adequate housing, in darkness, devoid of warmth.

Students in the Storm

In my role as a professor in Gaza, this weather causes deep concern. My students are not figures in a report; they are young people I speak to; smart, persistent, but extremely fatigued. Most attend online classes from tents; others from overcrowded shelters where solitude is unattainable and connectivity sporadic. Countless learners have already suffered personal loss. Most have been rendered homeless. Yet they still try to study. Their fortitude is remarkable, but it should not be required in this way.

In Gaza, what would normally count as routine academic practices—tasks, schedules—transform into questions of conscience, shaped each day by anxiety over students’ well-being, comfort and access to shelter.

On evenings such as this, I cannot help but wonder about them. Are they dry? Do they feel any warmth? Did the wind tear through their shelter as they attempted to rest? For those still living in apartments, or what remains of them, there is an absence of warmth. With electricity mostly absent and fuel rare, warmth comes mostly via bundling up and using the few bedding items available. Even so, cold nights are intolerable. What about those living in tents?

Political Failure

Agencies state that well over a million people in Gaza live in shelters. Aid supplies, including insulated tents, have been far from enough. Amid the last tempest, humanitarian partners reported providing plastic sheets, tents and mattresses to a multitude of people. In reality, however, this assistance was often perceived as uneven and inadequate, limited to band-aid measures that did little against extended hardship to cold, wind and rain. Structures give way. Respiratory illnesses, hypothermia, and infections associated with damp conditions are increasing.

This cannot be described as an unforeseen disaster. Winter is an annual event. People in Gaza understand this failure not as bad luck, but as neglect. People speak of how critical supplies are blocked or slowed, while attempts to reinforce weakened structures are frequently blocked. Community efforts have tried to make do, to provide coverings, yet they are still constrained by restrictions on imports. The failure is political and humanitarian. Remedies are known, but are withheld.

A Preventable Suffering

What makes this suffering especially agonizing is how avoidable it could have been. No individual ought to study, raise children, or fight illness standing knee-high in cold water inside a tent. It is wrong for a pupil to worry about the rain damaging their precious phone. Rain exposes just how fragile life has become. It tests bodies worn down by anxiety, fatigue, and loss.

The current cold season occurs alongside the Christmas season that, for millions, symbolises warmth, refuge and care for the most vulnerable. In Palestine, that {symbolism