Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip – First Heavy rains in winter season It came not as a blessing but as a new disaster for Samar al-Salami and her family.
Early in the morning, torrents of water gushed through their dilapidated tents in the displacement camp, shocking them as the ground beneath them turned into a muddy pool.
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All around them, displaced people clamored to repair what the rain had destroyed, filling waterlogged holes with sand and picking up mattresses soaked in the weak winter sun.
For 35-year-old Samar, the timing couldn’t be worse.
She was about to give birth and everything she had prepared for her newborn daughter was soaked.
“All the baby’s clothes were soaked in mud, you can see,” she says, picking up small clothes covered in brown stains. “Everything I had prepared was submerged in water, even the diapers and the box of milk formula.”
Samar, her husband and their three children live in a tent in Deir al-Balah near the tent where her mother and siblings live. They have all been displaced from their homes in Tal al-Hawa in southwestern Gaza City. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
“There are no words to describe how I feel right now,” Summer says, her voice almost breaking. “I feel like my heart is going to freeze. How am I supposed to welcome my baby like this?”
As Samar tries to salvage clothes and blankets, her husband and brother throw sand into the pool of water that has swallowed their living quarters. Mattresses, clothes and basic items are scattered around them, soaked and useless.
“I put the baby’s hospital bag in my mother’s tent, it would be safe,” she says, “but the rain rushed there first and washed away everything, including the bag.”
“I don’t know where to start,” she adds. “Should I take care of my children, whose clothes are full of mud and sand, so I have to take a bath with hot water?
“Or should I try to dry the mattresses which are too hard in this cold? Or should I prepare myself so that I am ready to give birth at any moment?” she asks.
Since the start of the war two years ago, aid agencies have warned that Gaza’s displaced families face disaster every winter, as they live in flimsy, tattered tents due to strict Israeli bans on building materials and convoys entering the Gaza Strip.
“Tents are not the answer,” says Samar. “In summer, there is unbearable heat and in winter, we get flooded. This is not life. And winter hasn’t started yet. What will we do when it gets really cold?”
“At least, why weren’t the caravans allowed in? Any roof to shelter us until this is over.”
A father was overwhelmed
Samar’s husband, Abdulrahman al-Salami, sits quietly, busy repairing the tent with her brothers. At first, he is so frustrated that he says he doesn’t even want to talk to Al Jazeera. But slowly it starts to open up.
“As a father, I am helpless,” says the 39-year-old. “I try to hold my life together on one side and it falls apart on the other side. This is our life during and after the war. We are unable to find any solution.”
He recounts the moment Samar called him that morning as he was on his way to his first day of work at a small barber shop.
“She was crying and screaming and everyone around her was screaming,” he recalled. “She told me, ‘Come quickly, the rain is attacking our tent from all directions.'”
He dropped everything and ran back into the rain.
“The place was completely full, like a swimming pool,” he says, his eyes welling up. “My wife and mother-in-law were screaming, my children were shivering outside, the tents were overcrowded, the streets were flooded… people were fetching water from buckets from their tents. Everything was very difficult.”
For Abdulrahman, the rain seems to be the last blow.
“We have been struggling in everything since the war began, and now the rains have come to finish us off completely.”
Fathers said they were facing great difficulties in providing essential items for newborns amid severe shortages and skyrocketing prices.
“I bought diapers for 85 shekels ($26), the same type we used to get for 13 ($4),” he says. “Milk formula is 70 ($21). A pacifier is also expensive. And now everything we had prepared for tomorrow’s delivery is ruined. I don’t know what to do.”
The couple can’t help but remember the life they once had; His warm, clean second-floor apartment in Tal al-Hawa, where he once lived a dignified and quiet life, as he said.
“Now the apartment, the building and the whole neighborhood are destroyed,” Samar says. “All our houses are gone. We have no choice but to live in tents.”
What scared the couple the most was welcoming their baby in this situation. Summer is scheduled for a c-section and will then return to the tent.
“I never imagined this,” she says softly. “I never imagined that I would welcome the girl we dreamed of under these circumstances.”
She admitted guiltily that she sometimes regretted getting pregnant during the war.
“In my previous deliveries, I came back from the hospital to my apartment, to my comfortable bed, and I took care of myself and my baby in peace,” she adds sadly.
“Any mother in the world will now understand my feelings, the sensitivity of the last days of pregnancy, her own labor and the early days after.”
Endless displacement
Like most families in Gaza, Samar’s has been frequently displaced, moving between Khan Yunus, Rafah, Nusirat and Deir al-Balah.
“I fled to my family’s house, then to my uncle’s house, then to my husband’s family. Every house we fled to is now destroyed, and everyone is homeless,” says Samar.
Their children, Mohammed, seven, Kinan, five and Yaman, three, have suffered the most.
“Look at them,” she says. “They’re shivering from the cold. They don’t have enough clothes. And the laundry I just washed is covered in mud again.”
A few days ago, the children needed to be taken to the hospital after being bitten by insects in the camp. Colds and sickness stalk them every night.
“The older boy couldn’t sleep because of the stomach ache,” says Abdulrahman. “I covered him and covered him, but it didn’t help. There were no blankets … nothing.”
For Samar, even the ceasefire did not bring relief. She denied this narration The war ended. For her, the war never stopped.
“They say the war is over. Where did it end?” Samar asks. “Every day there are bombings, every day there are casualties and every day we drown and suffer. This is the beginning of a new war, not the end.”
Request for asylum
Above all, the couple wants only one thing: dignity.
“Even caravans aren’t real solutions; they’re temporary,” says Samar. “We’re human. We had houses. We demand that our houses be rebuilt.”
Her final appeal is to humanitarian organizations.
“We need clothes, mattresses, blankets. Everything is destroyed. We need someone to stand by us. We need a place to shelter. It’s impossible to live on plastic sheets.”
In Abdulrahman’s case, he lays out their reality in one sentence as he spreads another layer of sand:
“Honestly… we have become flesh without soul.”
