GAZA (Dispatches) -- Torrential rain battered the Gaza Strip over the weekend, flooding thousands of displacement tents and makeshift shelters and forcing families to huddle together through the night in a desperate effort to keep from being swept away, in what aid agencies are calling a catastrophic failure of the promised winter response by the West.
Videos circulating from Gaza City showed children as young as three clinging to one another inside waterlogged tents, crying as brown floodwater ran through the canvas and soaked what little bedding and clothing their families possess. 
The footage underscored the collapse of shelter conditions across the enclave, where more than one million displaced people are now exposed to winter weather.
Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said it had received about 1,500 distress calls in just ten hours after the rain began early on Saturday, with water rising 30 to 40 centimeters in some shelters. Spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said several shelter centers were “completely flooded” and that “everyone inside them has now been forced out into the unknown.”
Mansour al-Sakni, 33, who lives with his wife and four children in a 30-square-metre tarpaulin room in Gaza City, said the family had sold two water barrels two weeks ago to buy new sheets, only to wake to find themselves surrounded by water. 
“The children were crying. I did not know what to do, and I started crying too,” he told Middle East Eye. He said he had used money given for his 10-year-old daughter’s eyeglasses to buy wood to reinforce the shelter instead.
Nasmeh al-Khatib, 26, sheltering with her two-year-old daughter and four other families in a partially destroyed home in northern Gaza, said her child cried through the night, asking: “Mum, why is the rain inside the house and not outside?”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a Nov. 5 report that people in Gaza still need approximately 121,000 tents and 561,000 tarpaulins, while available stocks include only about 2,800 tents and 76,000 tarpaulins, with no emergency shelter kits. 
It said terrorist Israeli authorities continue to reject the entry of timber needed for shelter kits, and warned that restrictions, delays and funding shortages could mean materials do not arrive until the second half of winter. 
An estimated 950,000 people live at displacement sites facing medium to high flood risk, including more than 400,000 at high risk, the agency said.
The Norwegian Refugee Council warned last month that Israeli restrictions on shelter materials and funding shortfalls would likely leave 1.65 million people facing a fourth winter in worn-out tents and war-damaged buildings. 
Civil Defense officials said they have no capacity to respond—Raed al-Dahshan, director of Civil Defense in Gaza governorate, told Al Jazeera the agency did not have “a single tarpaulin or a single tent” to distribute.
The flooding also damaged buildings weakened by bombardment. Residents were evacuated from a partially collapsed building in Nuseirat, and two people were injured when a wall collapsed in northern Gaza, according to Wafa.
For families like Sakni’s, the rain is only the latest chapter in an unrelenting catastrophe. “We are poor people in Gaza. We want to live. We do not want to die from the bombing or the cold,” he said. “Enough. Have mercy on us.