Michal Feldon
+972 Magazine / January 26, 2026
Israel’s restrictions on shelter and medicine have left displaced families helpless as newborns succumb to exposure and preventable disease.
Last week, Mohamed Abu Jarad returned to his tent in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighbourhood to find his three-month-old daughter, Shaza, freezing cold and no longer breathing. The family rushed the baby to hospital, where doctors pronounced her dead from hypothermia.
This tragedy came only a week after one-month-old Aisha Ayesh al-Agha had died of hypothermia in Khan Younis, and two weeks after two more Palestinian babies died from the cold in the north and center of the Strip within a few hours of each other: Mahmoud Al-Akra, only one week old; and Mohammed Wissam Abu Harbid, two months old.
In total, 10 infants under the age of 1 have died from hypothermia and extreme cold this winter, taking the total to around two dozen since the beginning of Israel’s onslaught on the enclave in October 2023, according to local health officials and Save The Children. All of them died while living in tents, their families helpless to keep them warm amid the freezing winter temperatures.
Medical experts in Gaza have coined a new term to describe these tragic losses. In an interview earlier this month, Dr. Abdul Raouf al-Manama, a professor of microbiology at the Islamic University of Gaza, used the phrase “wet tent syndrome” to sound the alarm about Gaza’s intensifying health crisis. A condition rather than a specific disease, he explained that it is caused by harsh living conditions including extreme cold, damp, and poor ventilation — all of which characterize life inside tents.
Tent dwellers are exposed to multiple health risks. Primarily, they are vulnerable to respiratory illnesses including recurrent respiratory tract infections, bronchitis, pneumonia, and worsening asthma. The humidity and lack of sanitary conditions in tents — along with limited access to showers, dry clothing, and hand washing — also tend to bring on skin diseases, including fungal infections, impetigo (a bacterial infection), rashes, and itching.
This slew of risks is heightened further by the immune deficiency associated with extreme cold and chronic malnutrition, which increases susceptibility to infections and makes recovery more difficult. These conditions also have psychological effects, including sleep deprivation, severe anxiety, and depression.
It is this influx of simultaneous stresses on the body that causes “wet tent syndrome,” which primarily affects young children, the elderly, pregnant women, the chronically ill, and people with disabilities. And the current humanitarian situation in Gaza means that hundreds of thousands are at risk.
Almost all of the Strip’s residents are currently displaced, with 1.5 million people — three-quarters of the population — living in tents or temporary structures. Most displacement camps are exposed to flooding; last month alone, over 30,000 tents were destroyed or severely damaged due to the stormy weather, leaving about a quarter of a million people with no shelter.
Despite the ceasefire, Israel is preventing caravans, temporary housing, or building materials from entering Gaza, classifying these as “dual use” items that it says could be used for military purposes by Hamas. And although the Israeli army claims it has facilitated the entry of “nearly 380,000 family tents, tarpaulins, and shelter materials” since the ceasefire came into effect, aid groups say this consisted mostly of tarpaulins, with only a little over 90,000 tents entering — far from what is required to meet the dire needs of Gaza’s population after more than two years of genocide.
Lessons from abroad
While there are no prior mentions of “wet tent syndrome” in the medical literature, the illnesses associated with displaced people living in unsanitary conditions in tents are common in disaster and war zones. In recent years, the phenomenon has been identified in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria.
The search for a comparable medical analogy in the Western world led me to studies on homeless populations in the United States and Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the unhoused, the rate of infection was much higher. Reports of complications and intensive care unit admissions were also 20 times that of the general population, while mortality rates were five times higher than those of people living in secure homes.
The medical consensus for many years has been that damp conditions drive mould and bacterial growth, subsequently increasing the risk of respiratory infections, asthma, allergies, and eventually severe chronic lung diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published guidelines in 2009 and 2015 acknowledging such risks, to avoid improper damp conditions in workplaces and residences.
In 2020, 2-year-old Awaab Ishak died from an unexplained respiratory illness in Manchester, England. Two years later, a delayed post-mortem examination determined that his death was caused by exposure to black mould that had developed due to inadequate ventilation and excessive dampness in his family’s one-room apartment.
In response, the British government enacted a 2023 amendment to the public housing law — “Awaab’s Law” — stating that landlords must address damp and mould hazards in any residential property they own. Moreover, in August 2024, the UK Health Ministry updated its guidelines on the issue, determining that beyond respiratory illnesses like Awaab’s case, substandard housing conditions also affect people’s skin, eyes, and mental health.
Whereas the death of a single toddler due to inadequate housing conditions led to changes in public policy in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza are living in tents without floors or roofs, beds or blankets, electricity or heating — and little is being done to ensure that last week’s victims will be the last.
A lack of essential equipment
The wave of Influenza A that hit Israel in November and December has also recently spread to Gaza. The major hospitals — Al-Shifa in the north, and Nasser in the south — have reported a significant increase in occupancy and morbidity as a result, as well as flu complications like bronchitis, asthma attacks, and pneumonia.
As a paediatrician working in a large public hospital in central Israel, I cannot recall any influenza morbidity as severe as what I have seen in recent weeks since the swine flu pandemic in 2009. And each time I transferred a child with a flu complication — such as extensive pneumonia or a severe asthma attack — from a paediatric ward to intensive care, I thought about how deadly a similar flu outbreak would be in Gaza.
Inside the Strip, not only do the appalling living conditions prevent recovery from respiratory viruses, there is also a severe shortage of essential equipment, including painkillers, fever-reducing medications, and medical devices needed to treat asthma.
At the start of the month, Dr. Ezz al-Din Shahab, a family doctor in the north of the Strip who is in contact with many of us in Israel, happily informed me that spacers — small plastic devices with a mask that attach to an inhaler in order to more effectively deliver medication — had arrived in the Strip after a painfully long wait. This is currently the only way of treating young children in Gaza who are suffering from asthma, as there is no electricity to operate nebulizers.
But the relief following Shahab’s message was short-lived. Two weeks ago, Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, head of the paediatric and maternity department at Nasser Hospital, informed me that there are no Ventolin inhalers anywhere in the Strip — meaning that although there are spacers, there is nothing to attach them to.
The lack of scientific research attention to morbidity caused by poor housing conditions among the displaced in war and disaster zones is not surprising. While there are many reasons for this, chief among them is the lack of sufficient medical data.
The scale of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system made computerized documentation impossible; even pen-and-paper documentation was not always a possibility, leading foreign doctors who volunteered in Gaza to bring paper and pens with them.
The little information collected outside the Strip about the health situation inside of it relies on case descriptions or verbal reports from medical teams on the ground, but the absence of data means these accounts cannot be compiled into formal research. As such, I assume we will never be able to officially prove the existence of “wet tent syndrome” in a way that would enable publication in scientific journals and raise awareness among health care professionals and humanitarian workers.
But I am not sure that scientific “proof” is required to be convinced that living conditions in tents — especially during the rain, cold, and flooding that winter brings — combined with the near-total collapse of Gaza’s health care system have created a humanitarian catastrophe. And still, deep into its third winter, there is no sign of it ending.
Michal Feldon is a senior paediatrician at the Shamir Medical Center
