Life in Gaza’s tents

Millions of Palestinians remain crammed into overcrowded tents, packed schools and other buildings, or sleeping on the streets of Gaza, as Israel continues its genocidal war on the enclave despite a fragile ceasefire.

Overcrowding, poor sanitation, a lack of food and a shortage of medicine have turned Gaza’s makeshift shelters into a breeding ground for infectious diseases.

“Even the minimum standards of human dignity and hygiene cannot be maintained under these conditions,” Samaher Saeed, Medical Aid for Palestine’s (MAP) protection manager in Gaza, tells Al Jazeera from southern Gaza.

“There's no stability, no safety,” Saeed adds, capturing the daily reality faced by displaced Palestinians.

What is life like inside a Gaza tent?

To understand just what living conditions are like in a tent in Gaza, Al Jazeera visited a camp in Deir el-Balah, the governorate with the highest number of active shelters.

The living space is divided into outdoor and indoor areas. The outdoor section serves multiple daily needs, including cooking meals over an open fire, washing dishes, hanging clothes and using the outdoor toilet, while the indoor area is primarily for sleeping and shelter from the sun or rain.

The tent’s shaded area measures 20 sqm (215sq ft) and is shared by an average of 10 people, giving each just 2sqm (22sq ft) of personal space, well below the UNHCR’s recommended minimum of 3.5sqm per person and 2 metres (6.5ft) height for proper ventilation.

The tent itself is built from old blankets and fabric scraps, with sheets of nylon held up with ropes and supported by metal and wooden poles. These materials offer minimal protection from rain, do little to ensure privacy, and fail to regulate temperatures during cold winters and hot summers.

“The tents that were set up early in the war have completely deteriorated after two years of use; they no longer protect people from shrapnel, the summer heat or the winter cold,” says Saeed.

Earlier reporting by Al Jazeera in Gaza describes a mother speaking of “a summer that has ravaged children’s bodies” and being “eaten by flies and insects” where the “tent environment is very miserable”.

In the corners of the tent, personal belongings are stored in sacks and cardboard boxes, while clothes are hung up to maximise space, allowing them to be quickly packed in the face of Israel’s constant forced expulsion orders and incessant bombings.

Kitchen space

Kitchen utensils, pots and pans are tucked away in another corner of the outdoor living space, while plastic containers store precious drinking water.

Just outside, an open fire is used for cooking, but it sits next to piles of rubbish, including cardboard and other materials to be used as fuel, releasing harmful smoke into the air and creating health risks.

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubbish have built up near camps.

Israel has restricted access to Gaza's two main landfills, at Juhor ad-Dik in the north and al-Fukhari (also known as Sofa) in the south, where this rubbish would normally be taken.

As of February 2025, the continued denial of access to the Sofa landfill, located in the no-go zone, is preventing the transfer of solid waste from the 30 temporary dump sites and numerous persistent ad hoc sites.

“We often find ourselves in situations where we know that people are living in dangerous or undignified environments near sewage, waste dumps or unsafe shelters, but we simply have no alternative to offer them,” Saeed says.

Sleeping area

Sleeping arrangements are rough; the best people can hope for is to find a thin foam mattress to sleep on, but there isn't one for each family member, and many end up sleeping on the ground. Blankets and pillows are stowed away during the day.

Toilet facilities

With few functioning toilets, people are forced to dig latrines or use buckets. According to MAP, on average, up to 600 people are forced to share a single latrine, 30 times more than the minimum standards.

Sewage and human waste flow into streets and near shelters as a result.

Lack of sanitation and hygiene

Access to basic sanitation and hygiene remains severely limited in Gaza, particularly for women.

Wafaa Nasrallah, a displaced mother of two, cannot afford to buy sanitary pads and has tried using rags and even nappies.

She is one of many women who cannot access hygiene items, and some have resorted to taking medication to stop their menstrual cycles entirely.

Menstruating women and girls also do not have access to enough water to wash or privacy in bathroom facilities to enable them to do so, even if they find the water.

“Girls are sleeping on bare ground during their periods due to the lack of clean bedding or private space,” says Saeed.

Israel has rendered more than 85 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure inoperable, from wells to treatment facilities.

Disease spreading

Preventable diseases are spreading in the camps due to overcrowding, the lack of clean facilities and a lack of medication.

According to a Journal of Medicine, Surgery, and Public Health paper published in April, Gaza currently faces an enormous infectious disease caseload, with 700,000 officially reported cases.

Contaminated water sources will “propagate waterborne illnesses such as cholera and dysentery, exacerbating the public health crisis”, where poverty, overcrowding, inadequate hygiene, contaminated food and a lack of safe drinking water all serve as significant risk factors for cholera.

Satellite imagery from October 2023 to September 2025 shows that Israel has flattened entire neighbourhoods across all five of Gaza’s governorates, forcing some two million people to flee, mostly south.

North Gaza was the first governorate to receive expulsion orders within the first week of the war. As more Palestinians were pushed south, many believed Rafah would be safe, but Israel attacked there anyway.

Satellite imagery from November 2023, one month after the war began, through January 2024, shows a camp area in Rafah completely razed in the space of two months.

Then, Israel claimed that al-Mawasi, a desolate coastal area in southern Gaza with no facilities, would be a “humanitarian zone”, ordering most people to go there. Within months, it was packed with hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Since then, Israel has repeatedly bombed the safe zone, and several Israeli massacres killing and injuring hundreds of people have shocked the world.

Satellite imagery around Hamad Hospital in Rafah on April 23 and July 18, 2025, shows tents and shelters around the hospital in April, but they have all but disappeared by July.

The satellite image below of Gaza Community College in Khan Younis from December 19, 2023 and February 4, 2024, shows a camp settlement almost disappearing within two months, the fate of the displaced people there unknown.

An encampment in Jabalia had tents on August 12, 2024, and was nearly empty on November 11, 2024.

Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency geolocated at least 954 documented shelters established across the Gaza Strip over the past two years, based on information from the local and international groups running them.

Most of these shelters, 65 percent or 624 sites, are camps of makeshift tents, often patched together from tarpaulin, metal, fabric or nylon.

Another 282 shelters are in schools and repurposed buildings, 14 are in hospitals, and the remaining 34 are in other facilities such as community centres, mosques, municipal buildings and warehouses.

Several families can be found crowded into one tent or one school classroom, without adequate furniture for sleeping, sitting, eating, cooking, or preserving minimal privacy.

People struggle without clean water, vital medicine or enough food to survive.

Nearly half of all shelters evacuated, destroyed or attacked

Over the past two years, Israel has attacked 447 of all of Gaza’s shelters, destroying, damaging or forcing them to close.

An analysis of satellite imagery from these locations found the following:

• Deir el-Balah has 282 shelters, with 93 percent (262) still operational and 20 marked as inactive.
• Khan Younis has 281 shelters, with just over half (151) inactive, particularly those closer to Israel.
• Gaza City has 179 shelters, of which 41 percent (73) are inactive.
• Rafah has 114 shelters, with a staggering 93 percent (106) inactive.
• North Gaza has 98 shelters, of which 97 are no longer operational.

One in four Israeli attacks targeted shelters, displacement centres, or internally displaced person (IDP) camps, of a total of at least 20,000 recorded attacks on Gaza, according to data from ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data).

Nearly half of the people Israel killed were in shelters

Between October 7, 2023, and September 19, 2025, Israel killed 22,402 displaced people in 4,900 such attacks, meaning that, at the time, roughly 39 percent of all people Israel killed in Gaza were killed in displacement shelters.

The animated map below shows where these 4,900 attacks were distributed around the Gaza Strip.

Most attacks have been air and drone strikes, accounting for 72 percent (3,554 incidents).

Artillery, shelling and missile fire made up 23 percent (1,139 incidents).

Other violent events, such as clashes or direct assaults, contributed the remaining 5 percent.

Which shelters were attacked the most?

• Bureij camp was attacked 557 times, causing 1,741 fatalities - an average of 24 attacks and 75 deaths a month.
• Nuseirat was attacked 510 times, causing 3,317 fatalities - an average of 22 attacks and 142 deaths a month
• Deir el-Balah camp was attacked 487 times, causing 275 fatalities - an average of 21 attacks and 12 deaths a month
• Shati camp was attacked 425 times, causing 1,412 fatalities - an average of 18 attacks and 61 deaths a month

• Jabalia Camp was attacked 420 times, causing 3,229 fatalities - an average of 19 attacks and 142 deaths a month
• Other repeatedly targeted locations are Maghazi, al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, Khan Younis city centre and Rafah camp.