In a series of three consecutive Ramadan arrivals in Gaza, this one hits different for the people, as many of them have lost almost half of their families.

There are no lantern-lit balconies in neighborhoods, nor crowded markets layered in the scent of spices and frying bread. In fact, in most of the Gaza Strip, entire residential blocks remain flattened. Where homes once stood, families are now forced to gather inside UN-run school buildings, sleeping behind makeshift curtains that attempt to create privacy in classrooms built for thirty children, not thirty displaced relatives.

Ultimately, this Ramadan is not taking place in a city recovering from genocide, but it is unfolding in a territory still broken from inside and out.

A Holy Month in a Shattered Urban System

Although the numbers are staggering, they are not abstract. Satellite assessments and international damage reports estimate that over 320,000 housing units across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. In a territory barely 365 square kilometers in size, that scale of destruction has erased entire neighborhoods.

Moreover, a joint international assessment has placed Gaza’s reconstruction needs at more than $53 billion, with approximately $20 billion required in the first three years alone just to restore essential infrastructure and housing.

Meanwhile, UN humanitarian situation updates continue to reference Gaza health authorities’ figures reporting over 70,000 deaths since October 2023, alongside mass injury and displacement.

This is the environment in which this Ramadan has begun.

A month meant for spiritual reflection now intersects with broken sewage networks, damaged desalination plants, fractured electricity grids, and hospitals functioning far below pre-war capacity.

Fasting in a Water Crisis

Fasting in Ramadan requires abstaining from water and food from dawn to dusk. However, in Gaza, the people fast for even longer, without any certainty of getting something to drink at Iftar.

Clean water remains limited in many areas. Residents rely on trucked deliveries or small-scale desalination output. Long queues form daily at water distribution points. During Ramadan, those queues stretch into fasting hours, turning a religious act of discipline into a period of patience.

Furthermore, Wudu, which is a ritual washing before prayer, becomes difficult when each liter of water is rationed.

Sanitation networks, heavily damaged during the genocide, remain only partially restored. In crowded displacement shelters, maintaining hygiene during a month of fasting is not simply about devotion, but about survival in confined conditions[OBH1] .

Iftar Without Homes

Before the genocide, Ramadan evenings in Gaza were intimate and loud at the same time. Families used to gather, extended relatives moved between homes, and kitchens were operated at full capacity.

This year, many families broke their fast under fluorescent classroom lights or in tent encampments erected beside damaged buildings. Meals are often prepared in communal kitchens operated by humanitarian agencies and local volunteers.

The humanitarian system reports the entry of hundreds of thousands of aid pallets into Gaza during ceasefire windows and negotiated access periods. Yet the presence of aid shipments does not automatically translate into the actual presence of aid and normal consumption patterns.

Damaged roads limit transport, while import restrictions on certain materials, often categorized under security frameworks, slow reconstruction. Employment opportunities remain scarce in large parts of the Strip.

In practical terms, Ramadan in Gaza has shifted from household-based consumption to aid-dependent distribution.

Charity replaces commerce, and communal pots have replaced private kitchens.

Mosques Without Minarets

Many mosques across Gaza sustained damage, and most of them have completely obliterated. However, some are partially operational. Where structures are unsafe, congregational prayers move into open spaces or shelter corridors.

The special Ramadan prayer – Taraweeh – although continued, is offered under emergency lighting, and sometimes outdoors.

Ramadan is traditionally a month of collective rhythm. However, in Gaza, that rhythm competes with displacement patterns that separate families across districts and temporary shelters.

Internal displacement reporting from humanitarian agencies shows that the vast majority of Gaza’s population has experienced at least one displacement cycle since the genocide began.

So, Ramadan, which usually strengthens communal bonds, now unfolds across fragmented social networks.

Children and the Weight of This Ramadan

For children, Ramadan often carries excitement due to special meals, extended nights, and anticipation of Eid.

But this year in Gaza, childhood is shaped by trauma exposure, interrupted schooling, and crowded shelter life.

Education facilities across the Strip sustained heavy damage. In this context, many school buildings continue to function as displacement shelters. Learning remains inconsistent, while psychological support services partially operate under immense strain relative to need.

This Ramadan does not offer a distraction from hardship. It intensifies it because children understand that the environment around them has changed in ways that feel permanent.

Faith in a Managed Reality

Despite all this, fasting continues. The Holy Qur’an is recited in shelters. Charity circulates among families who have little to give, and neighbors share what they receive.

However, resilience should not be romanticized. Spiritual endurance does not remove the need for sovereignty over rebuilding.

Ramadan this year reveals something deeper than devotion. It reveals a population practicing its faith inside a humanitarian crisis rather than a functioning civic structure.

It reveals that survival and worship are unfolding simultaneously, in a landscape where reconstruction plans are debated far beyond Gaza’s borders.

Ramadan in Gaza is not silent. It is disciplined, restrained, and carried out under the weight of destruction that remains visible in every damaged skyline. In a nutshell, the holy month has arrived, but the people are forced to live in abysmal conditions for life.

In an unfortunate series of events in Gaza, some deaths arrive without the sound of missiles. It’s just a tent that fails in wind and rain, a baby whose body can’t hold sufficient heat, and a clinic that can’t keep a neonatal ward warm due to fuel scarcity.

This winter, cold is not an “act of nature” in Gaza, but a predictable outcome of mass displacement into makeshift shelters. Additionally, aid restrictions further exacerbate the situation.

On January 10, 2026, the death of Mahmoud Al-Aqraa, a seven-day-old infant in Deir el-Balah, was reported. Medical sources attributed his death to extreme cold. The same report highlighted nighttime temperatures in Gaza dropping as low as 9°C (48°F) in recent days.

Apparently, nine degrees sounds survivable, but only in a home with a roof, dry bedding, electricity, and heat. But when it comes to Gaza’s displacement camps, it is fatal.

The Numbers Behind the “Winter Crisis”

People in their blankets are unable to realize the heart-trembling cries of the innocent children of Gaza. The UN’s humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) documented that since 10 December, more than 42,000 tents or makeshift shelters were estimated to have sustained full or partial damage across 320 displacement sites, affecting at least 235,000 people.

However, that is not a handful of torn tents, but a shelter system collapsing in real time, over weeks, repeatedly, during storms.

OCHA also warned that winter storms are heightening the risk of cold-related illnesses and preventable deaths, particularly among children under five.

Some of them are documented as follows:

• Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded three children who died of hypothermia, including a two-month-old who died on 29 December.
• OCHA also cited Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reporting that a 29-day-old infant died on 18 December shortly after admission to Nasser Medical Complex.

So, these are not just weather tragedies, but deaths occurring inside a controlled environment of deprivation by Israel.

How Blockade Turns Cold into An Executioner

Cold kills fastest when three protections are removed, namely: shelter, fuel, and medical capacity.

In a series of genocidal events, Israel continues to limit the number of tents and sustainable shelters entering Gaza, and also blocks mobile homes and materials used to fix damaged tents.

This matters because winter deaths aren’t random, but followed by a mechanical chain:

1. Storm hits: Tents rip, flood, and are destroyed by a catastrophe
2. Families move: Often to beaches or low-lying areas with poor drainage
3. Bedding stays wet: Children sleep cold and damp for days
4. Respiratory infections surge: Especially among infants
5. Hospitals struggle: Cold wards are facing power/fuel instability, resulting in a higher mortality risk

Moreover, OCHA recorded that storms have inundated tents with seawater in places like Al Mawasi in Khan Younis. It rendered many shelters uninhabitable, forcing families to move again. The world knows what’s happening there, but is not paying heed to these innocent lives.

Aid Access is Being Choked at The Exact Moment Winter Demands Speed

To add fuel to the fire, Israel barred the entry to Gaza of foreign medical and humanitarian aid linked to organizations facing suspension unless they comply with new registration rules. Resultantly, it affected 37 international NGOs.

Reports also quote an MSF coordinator describing how missing key staff creates “a gap” in aid service, and notes UN concerns that registered groups would meet only a fraction of what’s required.

It is evident that aid is being deliberately blocked at a time when it is most needed. Winter is the worst time for gaps, and when tents are destroyed, the timeline isn’t “next month.” It’s tonight.

What Gaza’s Winter Proves: Deprivation Can Kill Without Airstrikes

If a population is forced into tents, storms repeatedly destroy those tents, and the entry of winter protection is restricted while aid capacity is squeezed, then winter becomes more than weather.

It undoubtedly becomes a predictable tool of attrition. Even Gaza’s Civil Defence spokesman rejected the framing of a “weather crisis,” saying the disaster results from genocidal events still going on, leaving people in torn tents and cracked houses without safety.

What Would Stop These Deaths?

Preventing these innocent lives from disease and death is the need of the hour. There are a few steps that need to be taken at an immediate scale:

• Firstly, aid should be completely allowed to come along with relevant items for winter protection.
• Secondly, people of Gaza must be given reliable fuel supplies, food, electricity, and healthcare services.
• Thirdly, the bloodshed should stop, as hundreds of thousands of innocent lives have been lost by now.

To be specific, as per the OCHA reports, shelter partners have distributed 37,740 tents, 127,860 tarpaulins, and 94,980 bedding items since early December. These are far below the needs of over two million people requiring urgent shelter assistance.

In a nutshell, a winter night of 9°C should not kill a newborn.

It kills when shelter is shredded by storms, when bedding stays wet, when fuel and materials are restricted, and when humanitarian systems are squeezed.

Gaza is being forced to live outdoors through winter, and then blamed when the weather does what weather always does. Ultimately, the cold is not the killer, but the siege is.

On a cold winter night in Gaza, rainwater rushed through a tent camp built on bare sand. A mother clutched her child as the floor turned into mud. Unfortunately, there was no drainage system, no insulation, and no medical post nearby. By morning, the child was dead, not from a bomb, but from severe weather exposure.

This is how genocide unfolds when the cameras move on. It unfolds not always with visible explosions, but with unlivable conditions like cold, hunger, disease, and abandonment. Especially in Gaza, women and innocent children, like angels, are bearing the heaviest burden.

A War Measured in Children’s Lives

Since October 2023, Gaza has witnessed one of the deadliest assaults on civilians in modern history. According to figures cited by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with women and children forming the majority of victims.

Unfortunately, the scale of harm to children is unprecedented.

UNICEF reports that more than 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or injured during the ongoing war. It is a figure that includes deaths, permanent disabilities, amputations, and life-altering trauma.

To put this in context: this is not a “side effect” of war, but a systematic destruction of a generation.

Why Women and Children Are the First to Suffer

In siege warfare like this, vulnerability is engineered through heinous designs.

• Displacement forces families into overcrowded, unsafe shelters
• Blockades collapse food and healthcare systems
• Targeted infrastructure destruction eliminates water, sanitation, and maternity care

UN Women documents that women and girls in Gaza are facing disproportionate harm due to displacement, caregiving burdens, and loss of reproductive healthcare. These conditions escalate mortality even without direct strikes.

When survival resources shrink, mothers skip meals, girls abandon education, and pregnant women deliver without doctors.

Hunger as a Weapon: Mothers Starving First

Food scarcity in Gaza has been an important strategy by Israel to make the Palestinians starve to death.

UN Women reports that the majority of women in Gaza are now facing severe food insecurity, meaning prolonged hunger that directly threatens life and health.

Ultimately, pregnant women are among the most affected:

• Rising rates of anemia
• Inability to access prenatal supplements
• Increased risk of miscarriage and premature birth

For breastfeeding mothers, malnutrition translates into reduced milk supply, leaving infants vulnerable to dehydration and disease.

Pregnancy Under Bombardment: Giving Birth Without Safety

International analysts report that all the hospitals in Gaza have been bombed, besieged, or rendered inoperable. What remains is chaos.

Human Rights Watch has documented cases where pregnant women were forced to flee during labor, give birth without anesthesia, or deliver premature babies in shelters lacking electricity or clean water.

Moreover, neonatal units have collapsed under pressure. Doctors have described scenarios where multiple premature babies were placed in a single incubator, not due to medical judgment, but because there were no alternatives.

So, these are not isolated tragedies, but repeated patterns in a dismantled healthcare system.

Winter, Floods, and the Deaths No Airstrike Counts

As winter storms swept through Gaza, displaced families living in tents faced freezing temperatures and flooding.

Associated Press reporting, citing humanitarian agencies, documented children dying from exposure and illness in makeshift camps lacking insulation, heating, or drainage systems.

What would normally be routine humanitarian responses, winterized tents, blankets, and heaters, were blocked or delayed. It becomes evident that when aid is obstructed, the weather becomes lethal.

Orphans of a War the World Normalized

Beyond physical injury lies a quieter catastrophe. Thousands of children in Gaza are now orphaned or separated from their families. Schools have been destroyed or repurposed as shelters. Resultantly, education has been interrupted for months, in many cases, years.

Additionally, do not forget about the widespread psychological trauma.

When it comes to the United Nations agencies, they have warned about long-term mental health consequences for children exposed to constant bombardment, displacement, and loss. It also includes anxiety disorders, depression, and developmental regression. Consequently, this is how innocent childhood is being erased.

Gaza Is Not Alone: Children Targeted Beyond the Strip

While Gaza remains the epicenter, Palestinian children elsewhere are also under attack.

For instance, in 2025, a record number of settler attacks and child deaths in the occupied West Bank were reported, according to UN-verified data.

Moreover, children have been killed during raids, detained without charge, and subjected to night arrests. It reinforces that this violence is not confined to one battlefield but is embedded in a broader system of domination.

Counting the Dead When the Dead Are Still Buried

Critics often question casualty figures, but OCHA explains that Gaza’s death tolls are compiled through hospital records, morgues, and identification committees. Unfortunately, many victims are still missing under rubble, and the real numbers may be higher.

These numbers are delayed not because they are inflated, but because bodies cannot be retrieved.

Stories Too Few Know

• A mother who lost her newborn because the hospital generator failed in Rafah
• A girl who now cares for three younger siblings after her parents were killed during Israel’s bombardment
• A pregnant woman turned away from five hospitals before delivering in a classroom in Khan Yunis

These are not exceptions, but are the architectures of this catastrophe. In every tent, every empty incubator, and every orphaned child, the truth is written plainly.

People may forget, but history will remember who spoke and who looked away!