Denny Cormier

“This water isn’t just rainwater. It’s sewage too.” Wading through floodwater more than half a metre deep on al-Jundi al-Majhool Street in Gaza City’s al-Rimal district on November 7, 2026, the morning after the first winter storm hit the Strip. Before the genocide, al-Rimal was Gaza City’s most upscale neighbourhood. Now its shops are swamped, cars are submerged along the roadside, and the tents of displaced families pitched in the area have become pools of sewage and mud, with women and children trapped inside. The water has nowhere to go. Gaza City’s municipality says the Israeli occupation destroyed more than 220,000 metres of sewage pipes and around 15,000 metres of stormwater drains during the war, cutting the system’s capacity by more than 80 percent. Earlier, it reported that seven of the city’s eight main sewage pumping stations had been knocked out and that mountains of rubble block the drains that remain. Municipal crews are trying to pump the water away, but the occupation’s siege has left them short of the machinery and equipment to do it. Gaza’s Government Media Office puts the storm’s direct losses at around three million dollars so far. “They fled the bombing, and now storms have caught up with them.” Source: khames.hasira (IG)