‘It feels like hell’: Gaza families battle suffocating summer heat in tents
A girl fills containers with water drawn from the leftovers of underground pipes at a camp for people displaced by war in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City on 6 July 2026
Maha Hussaini reports in Middle East Eye on 28 July 2026:
When Middle East Eye met Rajaa Jendiya in January, she described Gaza’s winter as the harshest she had endured in nearly two years of displacement.
Now, the rain has stopped, but the same tent that failed to protect the Palestinian widow and mother of three from the winter cold has become a trap for stifling heat under Gaza’s summer sun. “It’s exactly like living in a greenhouse. The way the tent traps the sun’s rays and concentrates the heat creates the same conditions as a greenhouse,” Jediya told MEE. “The temperature and humidity become so intense that it feels literally suffocating and I have to go outside.”
Jendiya lost her husband when Israeli forces killed him on 14 March 2024 in one of the “flour massacres” during Israel’s siege and starvation of northern Gaza. She is among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who remain displaced, living in makeshift shelters such as the school in the heart of Gaza City where she now stays after her home in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of eastern Gaza was destroyed in an Israeli bombing.
With little access to basic services and few ways to escape the heat, summer has brought a new set of challenges for displaced families. “The heat is something, and the insects that come with it are another thing,” Jediya said.
“All night long, we cannot sleep because of the mosquitoes, and once the sun rises, flies take over,” she explained. “We cannot sleep either at night or during the day, and with the heat, we see new kinds of insects we have never seen before.”
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