Gunfire hits Rafah displacement tents as Gaza's aid teams race the rain: 279,000 people in flood-prone sites

Why the rain is a crisis

The last winter showed what rain does to a tent city. OCHA recorded in January that storms had destroyed or severely damaged thousands of tents and makeshift shelters, and it reported deaths, including of children, from exposure.

This year's numbers suggest that the risk has not gone away. OCHA's situation report of 2 October gave the following picture.

Together, OCHA says, people in flood-prone sites and unsafe buildings make up more than 13% of Gaza's population. Partners have been clearing drains, reinforcing shelters and repairing water and sanitation systems. The group that left northern Rafah this week was doing that same work.

So the gunfire has a direct cost. Each team pulled out of a site is a drain not cleared before the first storm.

Other shortages make this worse. OCHA has warned that restrictions on the entry of critical items are impeding preparations for the rainy season, and Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN's Deputy Special Coordinator, has said that shortages of medical supplies and fuel are compounded by funding gaps. The Food Security Sector warned in the same report that daily hot meal production and monthly household parcels would shrink significantly from October because of funding shortfalls.

Why it matters

The ceasefire announced on 10 October 2025 has reduced the fighting without ending the violence. According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, quoted by OCHA, the reported toll since that announcement had reached 1,431 people killed and 5,026 injured by the end of September 2026. Those figures come from the ministry and have not been independently verified.

Children carry much of the weight. In the last week of October, child protection partners reached nearly 4,500 boys and girls and more than 2,000 caregivers with mental health and psychosocial support. They identified almost 200 children needing individual help, including 20 who are unaccompanied or separated from their families and 17 who are injured. Follow-up continues for more than 2,000 children identified earlier. Partners also gave vouchers for autumn clothes to more than 1,000 children without parental care, and the UN and its partners supported more than 70 households that lost their shelters and belongings in incidents from airstrikes to domestic fires.

These are small numbers against the scale of need, but they show how the response now works: household by household, in a place where a tent can be lost to a fire, an airstrike or a flood.

OCHA's update does not say who fired on the tents in Rafah. Israel has disputed UN accounts of access restrictions in the past.

OCHA's update also covered the West Bank, where the olive harvest continues to be disrupted by settler violence and by restrictions on Palestinians' access to their groves. Olive oil is a main source of income for many rural families, and the harvest window is short. Food security partners have provided tools and machinery across nearly 80% of identified hotspots, and protection partners have supported volunteer harvesting and a protective presence for farmers. However, OCHA says that in most locations help reaches only a limited number of pickers because of funding shortfalls, violence and Israeli restrictions.

What happens next

The first heavy rains normally reach Gaza between November and January, and the coming weeks will test how much was done in time. The things to watch are whether more drainage and shelter materials are allowed in, whether teams can return safely to sites such as northern Rafah and whether donors fill the gap in food funding. OCHA publishes regular updates, and those will show how many sites have been reinforced before the storms arrive.