Before the war, Umm Ahmad lived in a five-storey house in Jabalia, in northern Gaza. It had apartments for each of her children to start their married lives. It had everything, she says. Now she lives in a cloth tent where she cannot stand upright, where rain floods the floor in winter and insects swarm in summer, where mice nest among the sleeping bodies of her family and food must be hung at the entrance to keep it from being eaten overnight.

More than two and a half years after the outbreak of the October 2023 war, the fabric tents scattered across Gaza have ceased to be temporary. For hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, they have become the permanent texture of daily existence. Umm Ahmad’s family has been displaced four times. “This is our fourth displacement,” she told UN News. “We have been on the streets for three years now.”

The suffering she describes is not incidental but structural. Three quarters of families in Gaza depend on water delivered by truck to plastic containers, with humanitarian partners distributing around 24,000 cubic metres daily through approximately 2,000 distribution points. Those deliveries depend on generators and machinery that are deteriorating for want of spare parts, which continue to be blocked from entering the enclave. Twenty-two attacks on healthcare have been recorded in Gaza this year alone. Barely half of the territory’s hospitals are partially functional. Not one can be considered fully operational.

The intimacies of displacement carry their own degradations. There is no privacy, Umm Ahmad explains. Two of her sons are to be married, and the family is trying to erect additional tents in a space already far too small. “You cannot imagine what we are experiencing,” she says. “Bathrooms and sanitation are another matter.”

She smiled only when her grandchildren came to her. Where there was once space and plenty, there is now a daily struggle for the most elementary necessities of life.

Sources: UN News (24 May 2026)