Gaza’s winter as a weapon of war: Living in tents of cloth and cold |
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 mobilised 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 criminalised. 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........