Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – The first heavy rain of the winter season arrived not as a blessing, but as a new catastrophe for Samar al-Salmi and her family.

Early in the morning, torrents of water crashed through their worn-out tent in a displacement camp, jolting them awake as the ground beneath them turned into a muddy pool.

All around them, displaced people scrambled to repair what the rain had destroyed, filling waterlogged holes with sand and lifting drenched mattresses into the weak winter sun.

For 35-year-old Samar, the timing could not have been worse.

She is due to give birth imminently, and everything she has prepared for her newborn daughter was drenched.

“All the baby’s clothes were soaked in mud, as you can see,” she says, lifting tiny garments covered in brown stains.

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