Nine-month-old baby dies of cold in Gaza: Doctor, civil defence agency spokesman

Detailed summary

Around 65 per cent of Gaza's people are still living displaced in tents or other temporary shelter, according to the UN ...

A nine-month-old baby died of hypothermia on Thursday, a doctor told AFP, after days of harsh weather and flooding in the Gaza Strip that added to the suffering of newly displaced thousands of Palestinians living in tents.

The doctor, who saw the child and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that nine-month-old Kinan Ahmad Raqiq "died from hypothermia inside his family's displacement tent" in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Gaza's civil defence agency spokesman Mahmoud Bassal separately confirmed the death of the child to AFP.

Heavy rain last week flooded tens of thousands of people's tents in Gaza, where virtually the whole population has been displaced at least once by three years of Israeli strikes in response to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.

Five people including three children died the day after the flooding when a sandy embankment collapsed onto their tents.

Since then, hundreds of displaced families have been seen fleeing camps in parts of Gaza City and central and northern areas of the territory after they were inundated by rainwater.

James Elder, spokesman on Gaza for the UN children's agency, Unicef, warned that flooding was just the beginning of the cold season.

"It's very important to know how bad things are in Gaza. It's not yet winter," Elder said.

"We're weeks away from winter, so we are getting unprecedented rain and cold."

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that as of November 8, 26,000 households were affected by storms.

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