Early in the morning, a torrent of water hit their tattered tent in the displacement camp, waking them up as the ground beneath them turned into a muddy pond.
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All around them, displaced people were running in the weak winter sunlight to repair things damaged by the rain, fill water-filled craters with sand and pick up soaked mattresses.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for 35-year-old Samar.
She is going to give birth soon, and everything she had prepared for her newborn daughter was soaked.
“All the baby’s clothes were covered in mud, as you can see,” she says, picking up small clothes covered in brown stains. “Everything I had prepared was drowned, 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. As a result of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, they have all been displaced from their home in Tal al-Hawa in southwest Gaza City.
“There are no words to describe how I feel right now,” Summer says. His voice is almost breaking. “I feel like I’m losing my mind. How can I welcome my baby girl like this?”
While Samar is trying to save clothes and blankets, her husband and brother are throwing sand into the water ponds that have engulfed their living space. Mattresses, clothes and basic items lay scattered around them, wet and unused.
“I kept the baby’s hospital bag in my mother’s tent, thinking it would be safe,” she says. “But it rained there first and everything, including the bag, got submerged in water.”
“I don’t know where to start,” she adds. “Am I supposed to care for my kids, whose clothes are full of mud and sand so I have to heat water and bathe them?
“Or should I try to dry the mattress which would be very difficult in this cold? Or should I prepare myself so that I will be ready to give birth at any time?” she asks.
Since the war began two years ago, aid organizations have warned that Gaza’s displaced families face disaster every time winter arrives, as they live in thin, tattered tents as a result of strict Israeli restrictions on construction materials and caravans entering the Gaza Strip.
“A tent is not a solution,” says Samar. “In summer, it’s unbearably hot, and in winter, we get flooded. It’s no life. And winter hasn’t even started yet. What will we do when the real cold comes?”
“At the very least, why aren’t caravans allowed in? There will be some kind of roof to shelter us until this is over.”
a father overwhelmed
Samar’s husband, Abdulrahman al-Salmi, sits quietly, busy repairing the tent with his brothers. At first, he became so frustrated that he said he didn’t feel like talking to Al Jazeera. But gradually he starts opening up.
“As a father, I’m helpless,” says the 39-year-old. “I try to keep my life together on one side, and it collapses on the other. This is our life during and after the war. We have been unable to find a solution.”
He recalls the moment when Samar called him in the morning when he was leaving for his first day of work at a small barber shop.
He recalls, “She was crying and screaming, and everyone around her was screaming.” “He told me, ‘Come quickly, the rain has attacked our tent from every direction.'”
He left everything and ran back under the rain.
“The place was completely filled like a swimming pool,” he says, tears in his eyes. “My wife and mother-in-law were screaming, my children were shivering outside, the tent was flooded, the road was flooded… people were scooping water out of their tents with buckets. Everything was very difficult.”
For Abdulrahman, the rain feels like the final blow.
“We have been struggling in everything since the war began, and now the rains have come to wipe us out completely.”
The father talked about his immense difficulty in providing essentials for the newborn baby amid severe shortages and skyrocketing prices.
“I bought diapers for 85 shekels ($26), the same kind we used to get for 13 shekels ($4),” he says. “The milk formula is $70 ($21). Even the pacifier is expensive. And now everything we 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 lived; His warm, clean second-floor apartment in Tal al-Hawa, where he once lived, as he says, a respectable and peaceful life.
“Now the apartment, the building and the entire neighborhood are destroyed,” says Samar. “All our family homes have been lost. We have no choice but to live in tents.”
What scares the couple the most is welcoming their baby girl under these circumstances. Samar is scheduled to have a C-section and will return to the tent afterward.
“I never imagined this,” she says softly. “I never thought I would welcome the daughter we dreamed of under these circumstances.”
She guiltily admits that she sometimes regrets getting pregnant during the war.
“In my last delivery, I returned from the hospital to my apartment, to my comfortable bed, and I took care of myself and my baby in peace,” she says sadly.
“Any mother in the world will now understand my feelings, the sensitivity of the last days of pregnancy, the early days of delivery and beyond.”
endless displacement
Like most families in Gaza, Samar has been repeatedly displaced, moving between Khan Yunis, Rafah, Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah.
Samar says, “I ran to my family’s house, then to my uncle’s house, then to my husband’s family. Every house we ran to is now destroyed, and everyone is homeless.”
Their children, seven-year-old Mohammed, five-year-old Kinan and three-year-old Yaman, have suffered the most.
“Look at them,” she says. “They are shivering with cold. They don’t have enough clothes. And the clothes I just washed are covered in mud again.”
A few days ago, children had to be taken to the hospital after being bitten by insects inside the camp. Cold and sickness follow them every night.
“The elder boy couldn’t sleep because of stomach pain,” says Abdulrahman. “I covered him and covered him, but it didn’t help. There’s no blanket… nothing.”
Even the ceasefire has not brought any relief for Samar. She rejects the statement that the war has subsided. For him, the war never stopped.
“They say the war is over. Where is it over?” Samar asks. “Every day there are bombings, every day there are martyrs, and every day we drown and suffer. This is the beginning of a new war, not the end.”
appeal for shelter
Above all, this couple wants only one thing: dignity.
“Even caravans are not a real solution; they are temporary,” says Samar. “We are human beings. We had homes. Our demand is to rebuild our homes.”
His final appeal is directed at humanitarian organizations.
“We need clothes, mattresses, blankets. Everything is ruined. We need someone to stand by us. We need a place to shelter. It is impossible to live on plastic sheets.”
As for Abdulrahman, he sums up their reality in a single sentence, spreading another layer of sand:
“Honestly…we have become a body without a soul.”
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