Gaza’s First Winter After U.N. Cease-Fire Deal Brings Floods, Deaths in Tent Camps

Peace on Paper, Disaster in the Mud: Gaza’s First Winter Under a New U.N. Deal

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The rain came before dawn, drumming on plastic sheeting and tin poles, then pouring through the seams.

By sunrise in a camp on the edge of Gaza City, brown water was up to a child’s knees. Mattresses floated. Blankets were soaked. Parents tried to lift their children onto plastic crates and broken chairs to keep them out of the flood.

Among those who did not survive the first weeks of winter was 7‑year‑old Ata Mai, who drowned after slipping into a pool of muddy floodwater in a tent camp in Gaza City, according to the United Nations and local health workers. Aid agencies say at least a dozen other people — including a newborn — have died in recent weeks from hypothermia and the collapse of storm‑weakened buildings.

These deaths are unfolding under a cease-fire and a new United Nations peace framework that its backers say is meant to end the war in Gaza and stabilize the territory. On paper, Gaza is entering a new phase under Security Council Resolution 2803. On the ground, families are watching children drown in ditches that did not exist before their homes were destroyed.

The disconnect between a heavily promoted diplomatic blueprint and life in Gaza’s flooded tent camps is emerging as the first real test of the agreement.

A cease-fire, a new framework — and tents under water

The U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2803 on Nov. 17, 2025, endorsing a U.S.-backed “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict.” The measure effectively gives the Trump administration’s Gaza plan an international legal framework, welcoming a phased cease-fire, the creation of an International Stabilization Force and a new “Board of Peace” to oversee transitional governance and reconstruction.

The resolution passed 13‑0, with China and Russia abstaining.

By then, a cease-fire had already been in place for more than a month. The truce, which took effect Oct. 10, halted large‑scale Israeli ground operations and was billed as the first phase of the peace plan, linked to hostage releases and a surge of humanitarian aid.

The Security Council’s president for November called the resolution “no mere paper promise, but a lifeline for civilians who have suffered too much for too long.”

Yet in the weeks that followed, heavy winter storms swept across the Gaza Strip, exposing how fragile that lifeline remains.

Between Dec. 10 and 17, severe weather damaged or destroyed more than 42,000 tents and makeshift shelters across roughly 320 displacement sites, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. Seventeen already damaged buildings collapsed in the same period.

UNRWA estimated at least 235,000 people were directly affected by flooding, driving rain and cold.

“This is not a natural disaster. It is a man‑made crisis compounded by winter,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a December statement, arguing that the storms would have been survivable if people had not been forced into flimsy tents on flood‑prone ground.

Nearly an entire population in limbo

Nearly the entire population of Gaza — more than 2 million people — remains displaced after more than two years of war, according to U.N. agencies. Many now live in sprawling encampments of tarpaulin and nylon stretched over metal or wooden poles, clustered along roads, beaches and vacant lots from Rafah in the south to the edges of the ruined neighborhoods of Gaza City.

Families describe sleeping in wet clothes on damp mattresses, with rainwater seeping in from above and sewage rising from below when drainage ditches overflow.

“Every time it rains, the children scream,” said a teacher sheltering with relatives in a school-turned-shelter in central Gaza, speaking by phone. “They think it is bombs again, and now they also fear the tent will fall on them.”

The first major storm in mid‑December, dubbed Storm Byron by local forecasters, turned several camps into shallow lakes. The U.N. humanitarian office said hundreds of “flooding alerts” came in from across the territory in a single day. Aid workers reported a baby dying of hypothermia after two days in a hospital, and health officials later confirmed additional weather‑related deaths, including older people trapped in collapsing buildings.

As 2026 began, the U.N. said at least six children had died from winter‑related causes in Gaza since mid‑December.

The peace architecture — and what is missing

Resolution 2803 lays out an ambitious security and governance architecture.

It welcomes a temporary International Stabilization Force, under a unified command, to deploy in Gaza to secure key infrastructure, oversee the disarmament of armed groups and escort humanitarian convoys. It also recognizes a new Board of Peace — envisioned as a kind of international administration for Gaza — to coordinate reconstruction, liaise with donor institutions and oversee a Palestinian technocratic committee meant to manage day‑to‑day governance.

The Board of Peace is chaired by U.S. President Donald Trump. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and representatives from several Arab and Muslim‑majority states have been named as members, according to officials involved in the process.

Supporters cast the arrangement as a necessary bridge to help Gaza transition from Hamas rule and Israeli military control toward reformed Palestinian self‑governance.

But as winter deepens, many of the key pillars exist largely on paper.

No International Stabilization Force has deployed to Gaza. The post of chair of the Palestinian technocratic committee remains vacant. The Board of Peace has legal personality under U.N. authority, but its headquarters, staffing and budget are still being negotiated, diplomats say.

In the vacuum, the security landscape remains largely unchanged. Israeli forces still control Gaza’s airspace and borders and carry out targeted operations. Hamas fighters remain armed and present, though mostly away from front lines since the cease-fire. U.N. agencies and humanitarian organizations have become the primary providers of food, shelter and basic services.

The cease-fire itself has reduced large‑scale violence but not ended it. U.N. and aid officials say more than 400 Palestinians have been killed and over 1,100 wounded in Gaza since Oct. 10 in airstrikes, shelling and other incidents.

From famine to fragile survival

The winter crisis comes only months after international analysts declared an official famine in parts of Gaza.

In August 2025, an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis found that more than 500,000 people were experiencing catastrophic hunger — the first IPC‑classified famine in the modern Middle East. Children showed soaring rates of acute malnutrition.

An update in December, after two months of cease-fire and increased aid flows, concluded that famine conditions had receded. However, the same assessment found that about 1.6 million people — roughly 77% of the population analyzed — still faced crisis‑level or worse food insecurity. More than half a million were in “emergency” conditions, and nearly 2,000 remained in the system’s most severe “catastrophe” category.

“These are fragile gains — perilously so,” U.N. Secretary‑General António Guterres told reporters in New York on Dec. 19. “Some 1.6 million people in Gaza still face extreme levels of acute food insecurity, and famine could return with frightening speed if hostilities escalate or humanitarian access is reduced.”

Aid groups say winter weather magnifies those risks. Cold and damp weaken already malnourished children. Floodwaters spreading sewage and garbage raise the risk of disease outbreaks that can quickly become deadly in overcrowded camps.

Disputed sovereignty under an international plan

The new framework has also raised legal and political questions that may shape how it functions on the ground.

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said in a November statement that Resolution 2803 “runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination” and “consolidates the unlawful presence of Israel” in the Strip by failing to address long‑standing occupation structures and accountability for wartime conduct.

A federation of human rights organizations, FIDH, called the resolution “shocking,” arguing that it risks “normalising” a de facto foreign administration under a humanitarian veneer while sidestepping alleged war crimes and apartheid‑like policies.

China and Russia, in abstaining, criticized what they described as a process too closely aligned with U.S. interests and negotiated largely outside a genuinely multilateral framework.

U.S. and several Arab governments, including Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, have defended the arrangement as the only viable way to end large‑scale fighting, remove Hamas’s military capabilities and unlock the billions of dollars in reconstruction aid that donors have pledged but never disbursed.

For residents of Gaza’s tent camps, those debates feel distant.

“What we need is walls that don’t leak and roofs that don’t blow away,” said a father of three sheltering in a camp outside Deir al‑Balah. “They talk about boards and forces. Winter is here now.”

Testing a new order against the next storm

U.N. agencies and aid groups have stepped up “winterization” efforts in recent weeks, distributing thousands of tents, blankets, tarpaulins and winter clothes. They say more than 230,000 families received food parcels in November, and aid kitchens are serving more than 1.5 million hot meals a day.

But humanitarian officials repeatedly stress that emergency supplies cannot substitute for rebuilding homes, repairing drainage and sewage networks, and restoring basic services — work that requires sustained access for construction materials and heavy equipment, and political decisions that have not yet been made.

Resolution 2803 anticipates a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza as the International Stabilization Force “establishes control and stability,” while still allowing Israel to maintain a security perimeter outside the Strip. How that clause is interpreted will determine who controls Gaza’s borders, and how quickly reconstruction can move beyond tents and tarpaulins before the next winter arrives.

For now, Gaza’s displaced population lives between clauses of a resolution and sheets of plastic, their safety tied to a cease-fire that has reduced but not ended violence, and to a peace plan whose institutions have yet to take root in the mud.

As another band of clouds gathers over the Mediterranean, mothers in the camps check the guy ropes on their tents, stack salvaged cinder blocks to raise their children’s beds a few inches off the ground and watch the sky, wondering whether the next storm will test the new order harder than any Security Council vote.