One-year-old Mohammed Bassiouni died of exposure to the cold on Tuesday. It was his first birthday.
That night, as winter storms lashed Gaza with cold winds and torrential rain, his family was shivering in a battered tent in Deir al-Balah where they had been displaced after fleeing Beit Lahia in northern Gaza.
“It was a night of rain and wind. We were up all night, his mother and I,” Mohammed’s father, Maher Bassiouni, told Drop Site. “At 4 a.m., the wind and rain calmed a little and me and his mother slept a bit. I woke up at 6 a.m. and I found the boy dead.” He spoke holding his son’s lifeless body wrapped in a purple blanket. “We belong to God and to him we shall return. God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs. I have nothing more to tell you. He is one year old. Today is his birthday. January 13th is his birthday, the day he died.”
The family rushed Mohammed to Al-Aqsa Hospital, but it was too late. His tiny body, still in diapers, was kept in the hospital morgue before he was wrapped in a white shroud for burial. Mohammed is the seventh child to die from hypothermia since the onset of winter, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including four since the beginning of the year—among them a baby just seven days old and a four-year-old girl. Another 25 Palestinians have been crushed to death as storms caused damaged buildings and walls to collapse on families seeking shelter inside or in tents nearby.
Israel’s continued strangulation of essential supplies during winter has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians shivering in the wet and cold and nearly three dozen dead. The genocidal war has displaced nearly the entire population and reduced Gaza to a broken landscape of rubble and collapsed structures. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now living in flimsy tents that provide little shelter from the elements. According to the UN, the heavy rains and flooding have rendered thousands of tents uninhabitable and placed nearly 800,000 people, almost 40 percent of the population, in flood-prone sites at heightened risk—leaving families exposed to the winter cold without blankets, mattresses, or heating. Hundreds of tents have simply blown away and makeshift shelters have been heavily damaged.
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