Heavy rain has flooded thousands of tents across the Gaza Strip, forcing displaced Palestinian families out into the cold as the first winter storm of the season swept through the besieged territory.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said its crews received about 1,500 distress calls in just 10 hours after the rain began early Saturday, with water levels in several shelter sites rising by 30-40 cm (12-16in).

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“What we feared has actually happened,” Civil Defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera. “A few shelter centres were completely flooded, and everyone inside them has now been forced out into the unknown.”

Basal said premature babies, the elderly and the sick were most at risk. “Those living in tents are at risk of death at any moment, and of illness at any moment,” he said.

The storm also brought down buildings damaged in Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave that erupted in October 2023.

The Civil Defence said rescuers had evacuated residents of a building in the central Nuseirat area that partially collapsed in the strong winds and rain. In northern Gaza, the wall of a separate building collapsed due to the heavy rainfall, injuring two people, according to the Wafa news agency.

Footage from camps in Gaza City, Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah showed families wading through ankle-deep water, mattresses and blankets soaked, and children standing barefoot in pools of mud and sewage.

“Even houses can’t hold up against this rain, so how can open plastic sheeting?” said Al Jazeera’s Nour Khaled, reporting from a camp in Gaza City. She said more than 28,000 widows were among those facing the winter alone with their children.

In al-Mawasi, the coastal area where more than 900,000 displaced people are sheltering in southern Gaza, rain had been falling since 10pm (20:00 GMT) on Friday, Al Jazeera’s Rami Abu Taima reported from Khan Younis.

“People woke up to find hundreds, even thousands, of tents flooded across the Gaza Strip,” he said. He added that more than 125,000 families living along the coast were at particular risk of having their tents swept away by the sea.

Gaza’s emergency committee said more than one million displaced people face the dangers of winter, and that the territory urgently needs about 200,000 tents along with heating supplies.

Raed al-Dahshan, director of civil defence in Gaza governorate, told Al Jazeera that crews could do little once they reached flooded families. “Civil Defence does not have a single tarpaulin or a single tent,” he said. “We deal only with saving lives, and that is not enough.”

Aid groups blame Israeli restrictions on the entry of shelter materials.

Mohammed Salha, director of the Palestinian NGO Network, told Al Jazeera that only 180 to 200 trucks were entering Gaza daily, far short of the 600 agreed under the humanitarian protocol of the “ceasefire”, and that only about 40 of those carried humanitarian aid.

“We don’t want to respond after the tents flood,” Salha said, adding that 50,000 tents had been waiting on the Egyptian side of the border. “We must respond before the disaster happens.”

He described international pressure on Israel to allow in more supplies as “timid”.