DEIR AL-BALAH: Aisha Al-Zain heard the cries of alarm between sunset and evening prayers on Sunday. People were shouting that a tent had fallen on Tahrir and her children.

Then came all the names, one by one: Habiba. Mariam. Tahrir. Ibrahim. Reem.

Al-Zain ran out barefoot, her head uncovered. Where the tents of her niece, Tahrir, and her daughter-in-law, Reem, had stood, there was now only a hill of sand.

“I found a mountain on top of Tahrir and her children, and on Reem and her children,” she told Arab News.

After a day of heavy rain, a sand embankment had collapsed onto tents in which displaced families were sheltering south of Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. At least five people were confirmed dead, three of them children, Gaza’s Civil Defense said.

The disaster happened during the first winter storm of the season in Gaza, which flooded at least 70,000 tents during a 12-hour spell, the Gaza government media office said.

Mahmoud Basal, a Civil Defense spokesperson, told Arab News his crews received more than 1,500 calls for help in the space of a few hours, but lacked the equipment and tools to respond to them all. Israel, he said, had destroyed the pumps his teams use to drain flooded tents.

“The bigger disaster is what lies ahead,” he warned.

A ceasefire agreement has been in place in Gaza since October 2025. Israel’s aid-coordination agency, COGAT, has said that more than 91,000 tents entered Gaza under its winter plan, but some equipment is banned because it says Hamas might use it. Save the Children told Arab News that Israeli authorities had not allowed enough tents into the territory.

Tahrir and Reem’s fateful path to the hillside in Deir Al-Balah began in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Their brother, Ibrahim Eid, said they fled south with their children about 18 months ago and eventually ended up in the camp east of Deir Al-Balah, where on Sunday night, with no warning, the sand came down on their tents and buried everyone inside.

Tahrir, also known as Umm Salah, who Al-Zain said was her brother’s daughter and was four or five months pregnant, died instantly. So did her daughter, Mariam Nabhan, and Reem’s daughter, Habiba, whose father was killed on Dec. 20, 2023, during the first Israeli incursion into Jabalia, the family said.

Reem was in a serious condition in intensive care at Nasser Hospital, and her son, Ibrahim, was in intensive care at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Al-Zain’s tent was separated from those that were buried by only a single sheet of cloth. She said two of her grandchildren survived only because they were out at the time: a boy was staying in town, and a girl had gone to a shop.

Eid blamed the Israeli occupation for driving families to remote, harsh places in search of shelter, and Arab nations for letting down the children of Gaza.

In three years of war, the family had been forced to relocate eight times, Al-Zain said: “Not one, not two — eight times.” She believes years of bombardments had weakened the hillside long before the rain finished the job of bringing it down. Now she asked only for the war to end.

Eid said: “Death follows us in every form. We don’t know how we will die: by shelling, by homes collapsing, and now by collapsing sand.”

All that remains, he added, is hope that the latest blood that was spilled might finally mark the end of the long road.