Heavy winter rain flooded displacement camps across Gaza this week, drowning makeshift shelters in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. Mud swallowed tents. A sand embankment, soaked and unstable, collapsed onto sleeping families, killing displaced Palestinians, including children.
Civil defence crews with no fuel pulled infants from waist-deep water where mattresses and flour bags floated like debris.
This is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made one.
Israel's 18-month war has destroyed over 70% of Gaza's housing and its entire drainage and sewage network. Gaza is a low-lying coastal strip that gets its annual rainfall in a few winter bursts. Its survival depended on stormwater lagoons, pumps, and concrete drains at places like Sheikh Ejleen. All are now rubble.
When rain has nowhere to go, it goes into tents. For an Indian reader, the picture is painfully legible. India knows monsoon fury from Assam to Chennai, but also knows resilience is built on infrastructure. Destroy the infrastructure and every shower becomes a flood.
Analytically, this is what experts call engineered vulnerability. Three layers of collapse are visible.
First, Shelter Apartheid: 1.9 million people pushed into floodplains and former buffer zones with only tarpaulin for a roof.
Second, Drainage Annihilation: Rain now mixes with raw sewage because treatment plants are non-functional, guaranteeing an outbreak of waterborne disease.
Third, Aid Chokehold: Even plastic sheets and pipes are blocked as dual-use goods. New Delhi's position - calling for a ceasefire, international humanitarian law, and a two-state solution while sending aid - now faces its limit.
You cannot air-drop humanitarianism onto a place where the capacity to be humanitarian has been bombed. The rain will stop in a few days. The water will be bailed out with buckets. But the logic that turned a predictable winter storm into a grave for children will remain. In Gaza today, there is no such thing as a natural disaster.
Tags:* #GazaFloods #GazaUnderWater #GazaCamps #EngineeredVulnerability #IndiaOnGaza #GlobalSouth #ClimateAndWar #CeasefireNow #GazaChildren #WarOnGaza
#GazaFloods #GazaUnderWater #DisplacementCamps #GazaHumanitarianCrisis #EngineeredVulnerability #ClimateAndWar #CeasefireNow