One million Gazans in need of proper shelter before winter, aid group says

Many people are living in camps made from blankets, sheets and sacks of flour after being displaced by the war

Palestinians, seen through a tear in a tent, ride a motorised vehicle through the rubble in Khan Younis. Reuters

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Israel must allow tent repair kits to enter Gaza so that residents displaced by the war can start reinforcing their shelters before winter arrives, the Norwegian Refugee Council said.

With the strict Israeli controls hindering the flow of goods into the territory, it would take two years to deliver enough new tents for the one million people in need of proper shelter, the NRC said.

The aid group is calling for 25,000 repair kits of tarpaulin, plastic sheets, rope and duct tape to be delivered each week.

“The international community, including the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union member states, must insist that Israel facilitates the delivery of sealing-off kits to southern Gaza,” said Alison Ely, the NRC's shelter cluster co-ordinator in Gaza.

Nine out of 10 people in Gaza have been forced out of their homes since the war began almost a year ago. Israeli bombardment and ground operations have forced the displacement of Gazans up to 20 times.

In southern Gaza, the UN estimates that there are 30,000 displaced Gazans in every square kilometre of the “humanitarian zone” in Al Mawasi, where Israel ordered people to move for their safety. This number was about 1,200 people before the war.

Ms Ely said tents distributed earlier by humanitarian groups need repair either because of wear and tear or because their owners have been displaced so frequently.

“They have to take them down and move them and that deteriorates the quality of the tents – so they need replacing or repairing,” she told The National.

Some people have been forced to live in shelters that they made themselves, she said. These can be made up of “blankets and sheets or flour sacks that they had sewed together to make roofs and walls”.

Ms Ely said that Gazans whose homes have not been destroyed would need help as most structures had suffered some damage from Israeli bombardment.

“Some have gone back to their damaged homes and there's no way of weatherproofing those places that have gaping holes in the wall or their doors blown out,” she said.

In May, a UN report said rebuilding damaged homes in Gaza will take until 2040. The process is likely to be delayed by the Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods that it deems to be of “dual use”, such as construction materials that could be used to build a tunnel network like the one Hamas created.

On Wednesday, Gaza's Ministry of Health said Israel was releasing 88 bodies taken from the enclave but demanded that they be identified first before being taken for burial. Previously, families have gone to border points to meet lorries carrying the bodies, or to hospitals where they were taken to check whether their loved ones were among them.

About 41,500 people have been killed and more than 96,000 others have been injured in Israel's war in Gaza the ministry said, with thousands more missing. The war began on October 7 after Hamas attacked southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people. About 250 were taken back to Gaza as hostages.