Five people, including three children, have been killed in central Gaza after a sand embankment collapsed onto tents sheltering displaced families during heavy rain on Sunday.

The collapse happened at a camp for displaced people near Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, where families have been living in makeshift tents after their homes were destroyed. Gaza's Civil Defence said the earthen embankment gave way during the storm and buried several tents, and rescue workers were still searching for people who may be missing under the sand.

Mahmud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza's Civil Defence, said the dead included three children and two women. Several other people were injured, some seriously, and were taken to hospital. The victims were named in local reports as members of two families, Sala Nabhan, Mariam Nabhan, Reem, Ibrahim and Habiba al-Zein.

The tragedy came as the first winter storm of the season battered Gaza over the weekend. Heavy rain and strong winds that began late on Friday flooded about 70,000 tents across the territory on Saturday, leaving tens of thousands of people without shelter, according to Gaza's Government Media Office. The office put the initial damage at about three million US dollars and said the rain had brought down dozens of walls.

Gaza City received 60 millimetres of rain in 12 hours on Saturday, about 15 per cent of its annual rainfall, municipal officials said. The Palestinian Civil Defence said it had received more than 1,500 emergency calls as rain flooded camps sheltering displaced families.

Most of Gaza's population now lives in tents or other makeshift housing after large parts of the territory were destroyed during the war that followed the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Aid agencies have warned for weeks that displaced families face severe risks as winter approaches, with limited shelter materials, damaged drainage and shortages of fuel and building supplies.

Hamas blamed Israel for the collapse, arguing that restrictions on the entry of reconstruction materials and the ban on new construction had left displaced families living in unsafe conditions. The group said more than two million Palestinians were concentrated in less than a third of the Gaza Strip, warning of growing danger for the overcrowded population in improvised camps.

The incident has underlined the fragile conditions in Gaza's displacement camps, where families are sheltering in tents pitched on sand and rubble with little protection from storms. Civil Defence teams continued to work at the site on Sunday evening, while hospitals in central Gaza treated the injured.

Aid groups say the storm has worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis, with families who lost their tents in the flooding having nowhere else to go. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees has said shelter remains one of the most urgent needs in Gaza as winter sets in.

Sources: Sweden Herald and Demócrata.