👨🏻‍🤝‍👨🏾🧑🏼‍🤝‍🧑🏻🛸🌷🌻✨️🐿🇵🇸

“We didn’t sleep all night. We held on from one tent pole to the next.” A bereaved Palestinian woman in Gaza stands in what is left of the tent she shares with nine members of her family, its fabric ripped open after the first winter storm swept through the Strip. When the wind tore the tent away in the night, they sat in the street until morning, crying, as she told her children to pray. The plastic sheets they were given blew off, every three of them share a single blanket, and the children have no warm clothes and no heating. Two of her daughters are university students, and she cannot afford to provide for them, nor to feed the family, give them water, clothe them or buy firewood. Around 70,000 tents flooded in the storm’s first 12 hours, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office. This is the fourth winter Gaza’s displaced have spent in tents, and a year into the ceasefire the Israeli occupation still restricts the entry of caravans, sturdy tents, tarps and building materials. “We haven’t despaired,” she says. “But if we cry, we cry from the weight of the days.”