As Gaza floods subside, Palestinians assess human and material damage

Résumé détaillé

A deadly sandbank collapse buried families alive in Deir el-Balah, as survivors describe desperate rescue attempts.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Gaza is dealing with the cleanup of catastrophic flooding after storms submerged displacement camps and war-destroyed cities.

Heavy rain has directly affected 106,000 people in Gaza, according to UNICEF, with thousands of tents for displaced Palestinians submerged under water and latrines overflowing into camps.

The floods also brought death: a sandbank under pressure from heavy rain collapsed at the Ard al-Ribat displacement camp in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on Sunday evening, killing three children and a woman.

Without excavation equipment, residents had to dig through the sand with their bare hands to reach people trapped under debris. When darkness came, they used flashlights on their mobile phones to search for survivors.

Zahira al-Sahar, 58, was preparing to sleep in her tent in the camp on Sunday when she and her 28-year-old daughter were almost entombed in the collapse.

“I was lying in my bedding when something suddenly pushed me and came down on top of me,” al-Sahar told Al Jazeera. “The sand reached up to my neck. My daughter was beside me, and she was almost completely buried.”

Her sons came to the rescue. “I told them: ‘Pull your sister out first, then come back for me.’ They pulled her out, then came back and rescued me,” she said.

Meanwhile, in a neighbouring tent, members of the al-Nabhan family were also buried in the sandbank’s collapse.

“[When I realised] I started screaming and calling for people to come and help,” al-Sahar said. “I told everyone that our neighbours had been buried. We kept shouting: ‘Please, save them. Our neighbours are gone.’”

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