// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Floods Force Gaza to Choose Between Clean Water and Pumping Out Sewage
As Gaza floods overwhelm displacement sites, municipal teams in Al Maghazi refugee camp face a difficult trade-off: Pumping floodwaters out of shelters means taking away fuel needed to supply residents with drinkable water.
“The diesel we use for these pumps comes from the allocation for the wells that are supposed to pump water,” says municipal engineer Imad Abdel Jawad, and this is at a time when their supply is already insufficient.
Rainstorms swept through Gaza over the weekend of November 7 and 8, overwhelming damaged sewage networks and makeshift shelters. In some tents in Al Maghazi, the water was well over a foot deep, Jawad says.
For Hanan Saied, 46, the storm soaked the bedding and clothing she shares with her seven children. She lives in a shelter in Al Maghazi with mud walls, cracks, and plastic sheeting covering the roof, which WIRED Middle East visited.
“The house flooded, and stones and mud fell on us,” Saied says. “The bedding was soaked, and the children’s clothes were soaked.”
Her children used buckets to move water away while her eldest son tried to repair the shelter. Saied spent the night holding her daughter, Sara, who she says has asthma, trying to keep her warm.
Gaza’s Government Media Office has said at least 70,000 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians had flooded within 12 hours.
On 8 November, the Israel account on X, run by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted, “Contrary to popular belief, Israel does not control the weather.” The post did not explicitly mention Gaza floods.
The flooding comes after widespread destruction of Gaza’s housing. An April assessment by the European Union, United Nations, and World Bank found that more than 371,888 housing units had been damaged or destroyed and around 1.9 million people internally displaced, often repeatedly.
By 8 November, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 1.4 million people—65 percent of Gaza’s population—were living in tents or shelters. Humanitarian partners had received appeals from more than 26,000 households whose shelters or belongings had been damaged.