As winter floods sweep Gaza’s displacement camps, the denial of tents, caravans and fuel shows how a ceasefire’s humanitarian promises can be turned into leverage.
More than a year after the October 2025 ceasefire was meant to open Gaza to relief, the clearest test of whether that truce is real is no longer whether bombs fall, but whether a family can sleep through a rainstorm. By that measure, the ceasefire is failing. As winter flooding swept through displacement camps this month, Israel continued to block the entry of tents, repair materials and mobile homes, despite the aid provisions written into the agreement. What is unfolding is not a gap in logistics. It is a policy choice about who gets shelter, when, and on whose terms.
The numbers behind the mud
The scale is documented by the humanitarian system itself, not by advocacy groups alone. According to the UN’s latest Gaza snapshot, about 1.2 million people, or 58 per cent of the population, are living in “critical” or “catastrophic” shelter conditions, the two highest severity phases on the humanitarian scale. Save the Children, drawing on the same Shelter Cluster assessment, says over 560,000 of them are children. Flood exposure is just as stark: the UN estimates that more than 400,000 people live in 451 displacement sites at high risk of flooding, within a wider pool of over 950,000 in medium- or high-risk sites.
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The household data reveal what this means in practice. In the Shelter Cluster survey, 84 per cent of families reported no effective way to heat their shelters, while nearly half said they burn plastic, tyres, garbage or cardboard to cook. That second figure is a public-health warning in its own right: burning such materials in enclosed tents exposes children to toxic fumes, respiratory illness and the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rights monitors note that 11 children died of hypothermia in Gaza last winter. The Norwegian Refugee Council estimates that 1.65 million people now face a fourth winter in worn-out tents and damaged buildings, and its Secretary General Jan Egeland has called this a man-made crisis rather than a natural disaster.
Caravans: the promise that never crossed the border
The most revealing element of the obstruction concerns caravans and prefabricated homes. These were meant to be the ceasefire’s answer to the obvious problem that fabric tents cannot survive a Mediterranean winter. Gaza’s Government Media Office has claimed that Israel agreed to admit 60,000 mobile homes and 200,000 tents under the deal; the exact figures in the humanitarian protocol have never been made public, and UNRWA itself says it has no details of that protocol. What is not in dispute is the outcome. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reports that large quantities of tents, caravans and prefabricated units remain stranded at Gaza’s borders, and that it has seen no temporary housing units arrive. In Save the Children’s blunt framing, the tents, shelter kits and fuel are waiting at the border while children sleep in floodwater.
Israel’s position deserves to be stated fairly. COGAT, the Israeli body coordinating activity in the territories, says over a million tents have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, and Israeli officials have long justified restrictions on “dual-use” materials by citing the risk of diversion to Hamas. Some aid agencies have also cautioned that caravans could turn temporary displacement into permanent displacement if reconstruction stalls. But these arguments do not explain the blockage of tarpaulins, sealing kits, blankets and heating fuel, none of which plausibly threatens Israeli security. Nor does a headline tent count mean much when the UN’s own shelter data show more than half the population still in the worst conditions. A security rationale that cannot distinguish a prefab cabin from a weapons cache is not a security rationale; it is leverage.
Shelter as leverage
This is the analytical core of the issue. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power is obliged to ensure the supplies essential to a civilian population’s survival, and to allow relief consignments through when it cannot provide them itself. Rationing shelter during winter turns that obligation inside out: survival becomes a variable to be managed, and a humanitarian commitment becomes a bargaining chip in the wider negotiations over Gaza’s future governance, disarmament and reconstruction. The pattern also exposes a structural weakness in the ceasefire. Its humanitarian clauses depend almost entirely on the goodwill of the party controlling the crossings, with no independent mechanism to verify compliance or impose costs for non-compliance.
The UN system has been increasingly direct about this. UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Dr Ramiz Alakbarov expressed concern in August over Israeli airstrikes that caused civilian casualties and damaged vital medical supplies and civilian infrastructure, urging all parties to uphold their obligations under international law. More recently, UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher rejected the idea that relief should wait until Israel forms a new government, a pointed reminder that civilian survival cannot be held hostage to another state’s domestic politics.
A widening international consensus
Criticism of the obstruction is not confined to one region or bloc. In Europe, EU Crisis Management Commissioner Hadja Lahbib called for greater humanitarian access on 8 November as floods swept the camps. A day later, the European Commission’s spokesperson said the EU had repeatedly pressed the Israeli government at every level to allow full humanitarian access, noting that the bloc has allocated nearly €700 million to Palestinians since October 2023. Some member states want Brussels to go further: Spain, Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg have urged the EU to use its “considerable leverage” with Israel to address the crisis.
Beyond the EU, a group of Western and like-minded states has made the same case on shelter specifically. Last winter the foreign ministers of the UK, Canada, France, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland warned that the situation remained catastrophic and called on Israel to lift restrictions on “dual-use” imports and open the crossings. Last December, a UN General Assembly resolution demanding unrestricted humanitarian access, particularly for UNRWA, won the backing of 139 countries, with only 12, including Israel and the United States, voting against.
In the Arab and Muslim world, the response has been coordinated. The foreign ministers of Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan, a group that includes three of the ceasefire’s mediators, met in New York in September and called on Israel to immediately fulfil its outstanding commitments under the first phase of the peace plan, including on aid. Earlier, the same eight states had voiced grave concern over storms and inadequate shelter and demanded that the UN and international NGOs be allowed to operate freely.
Pakistan has been among the more outspoken voices within this group. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned Israel’s continued illegal actions to deny basic assistance to Gaza’s people on 9 November and directed the Foreign Ministry to pursue all possible means to step up urgent aid. Islamabad’s position is that the denial of necessities is a grave violation of both the ceasefire and international law.
Israel, for its part, has rejected such criticism, accusing European officials of ignoring improvements on the ground. But the breadth of the consensus is itself the point. When European institutions, Western allies of Israel and the ceasefire’s own Arab and Muslim mediators all identify the same problem, it is difficult to dismiss as partisan. The concern they share is a practical one: if a ceasefire’s humanitarian terms can be ignored without consequence, the credibility of every future ceasefire is weakened.
Yet the test is practical rather than rhetorical. Statements of concern, however broad, have not moved a single caravan across the border. What would change the picture is a verification mechanism for the ceasefire’s humanitarian provisions, public disclosure of the agreed aid protocol, and sustained pressure from the ceasefire’s guarantors on the entry of shelter, fuel and winter supplies. Donors must also fund agencies such as UNRWA, which remain the backbone of the response.
Gaza’s winter will not wait for diplomacy to mature. Each week of obstruction is measured in flooded tents, burning plastic and children exposed to cold. Israel must halt its obstruction of assistance essential to civilian survival, and those who brokered the ceasefire must ensure immediate and unconditional humanitarian access. A ceasefire that leaves more than half a population in catastrophic shelter conditions is not yet peace. It is a pause in one form of harm that has allowed another to continue.
