Gaza’s winter
weapon of war

By any measure of humanity, the sight is unbearable: tents stitched from old blankets, torn clothes, and scraps of plastic laid directly on the sandy ground of Gaza. What passes for “shelter” today is little more than a thin membrane between life and death. These makeshift structures—funded initially by an extraordinary wave of popular solidarity across the Arab region—were never meant to withstand a year, let alone the brutal cold and storms of this winter. They were meant to be temporary solutions during what people believed would be a temporary war.

But the war never ended.

Charities, Red Crescent societies, and civil society volunteers mobilized early on to respond to the mass displacement—thirteen displacements for some families—within the besieged Strip. They managed to erect improvised encampments, distribute water, and send food parcels. Communities pooled whatever resources they had, refusing to abandon one another. It was grassroots humanitarianism at its most heroic.

Slowly, methodically, the colonial Zionist apparatus worked to suffocate that activism. Arab donors were pressured, funding channels disrupted, local initiatives monitored, suppressed, or criminalized. The same regional and international powers that watched Gaza burn moved simultaneously to cut the water hose that ordinary people held out to its residents.

By the end of last year, two illusions took hold: that external support would resume, and that the war—led by Zionist drones, its surveillance planes, its assassinations, its constant explosions—might be slowing. Neither illusion survived.

Today Gaza’s war is being waged on two fronts. The first is the familiar one: Israel, backed politically and militarily by the United States, continues to target civilians, community leaders, and members of the resistance. The second is quieter but deeply corrosive: the planting of collaborators and informants among a population exhausted by hunger, grief, family member losses and repeated displacement. It is a strategy that deepens despair, fractures trust, and weakens the fabric of a community struggling to survive and remain with steadfastness on the land of Historical Palestine.

And now, winter.

Last year’s winter in Gaza was mild. It allowed the world to maintain its fantasy that tents—these fragile, patchwork tents—were an adequate response to the forced displacement of more than two million people. But this winter is unforgiving. Rainstorms have flooded the camps. Winds have torn open the thin coverings that families call “ provisional home.” Children shiver in wet clothes. Mothers cry as their summer-dressed toddlers tremble in the cold air. Elderly people sleep on damp sand. There are no floors, no insulation, no heating. Water pools inside the tents, not outside.

What kind of modern world allows this?

The images emerging from Gaza today are not natural disasters. They are not the consequence of poverty, nor of mismanagement, nor of weather alone. They are the outcome of deliberate policies—policies designed not only to uproot Palestinians from their homes, but to ensure that the conditions of their displacement are so unbearable that leaving becomes the only imaginable option.

For the last year, Palestinians have endured forced displacement, forced amputations and physical disabilities, forced mass imprisonment, forced starvation, and more recently, the spectacle of forced “voluntary migration”: flights carrying some of Gaza’s residents to unknown destinations under the guise of humanitarian evacuation. And now, in the bleakest expression of this architecture of violence and ethnic cleansing, we are witnessing forced freezing.

Let us be clear: there is nothing technologically or logistically complicated about providing proper shelter quickly. Caravans, prefabricated units, and modular homes can be delivered within days to disaster zones around the world—including areas far less accessible than Gaza. The global humanitarian system has the capacity, the equipment, and the funding mechanisms. What it does not have is the political permission nor the political ability to fight for human rights for those Palestinians under colonial occupation.

For months, conversations within humanitarian circles have circled the same tragic truth: caravans are not allowed into Gaza because caravans, unlike tents, might imply permanence. They might suggest that displaced Palestinians are settling, stabilizing, surviving. A population that survives is a population that can return, rebuild, resist. A population that freezes is easier to force and ethnically cleanse into the next stage of displacement.

What does it mean that the international order—boasting its UN agencies, its human rights architecture, its humanitarian machinery—has not secured even the minimum protection against weather for a besieged civilian population? What does it mean that Western governments, with all their influence, cannot or will not demand that life-saving shelter be allowed into Gaza? What does it mean that Arab states, despite their rhetoric, are increasingly deterred from supporting Palestinian civil society, even when the need is desperate and the moral imperative obvious?

We are not witnessing a failure of the system. We are witnessing the system working exactly as intended by a colonizer world.

The inaction of global powers is not a passive silence—it is complicity. States that provide weapons, diplomatic cover, and legal shields to Israel cannot feign helplessness when confronted with the images of children sleeping in icy pools of water. Neither can those who continue to speak of “both sides,” “de-escalation,” and “ceasefire negotiations” while a population is deliberately engineered into unlivable conditions.

Today, as tents collapse under rain and wind, the question is not why Gaza lacks proper shelter. The question is: who benefits from Gaza’s continued dispossession? Who sees strategic gain in the exhaustion, the cold, the hunger, the psychological breakdown of an entire population of Palestinians in Gaza? And why is the world participating—actively or by silent consent—in a process that amounts to the slow erasure of a Palestinian nation?

No amount of humanitarian aid, no number of temporary structures, will solve what is fundamentally a political crime. Gaza does not need tents; it needs justice. It needs the right to live without siege, without bombardment, without engineered famine or displacement. It needs an international community willing to confront, not accommodate, the systems of domination that have turned survival into resistance and winter into a weapon.

Yet, in the face of this darkness, Palestinians persist. They rebuild fallen tents. They dry their children’s clothes over makeshift fires. They share the little they have. Their endurance, dignity, and collective strength remain the one thing no colonial architecture has been able to break.

As the world watches Gaza shiver, the question is not whether Palestinians will survive this winter. History shows they will. The question is whether the world can still claim to be civilized or modern while letting them freeze.

-Dr Oroub El-Abed is an Associate Professor in the international migration and refugee program at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her article appeared in MEMO.