SOME 800,000 Palestinians have faced flooding, bitter cold and lack of shelter since Storm Byron hit Gaza last week, killing at least 14 people, including three children and another 10 in just 24 hours at the weekend. The latest catastrophe hit after months of the Israeli government continuing to bomb civilians and refusing to allow emergency shelters or building materials and equipment into Gaza, despite the “ceasefire” in place since October. 

According to the United Nations, the occupation forces — which specifically targeted and destroyed surviving construction equipment before the ceasefire — have refused to allow tents, materials for shelters, and even basic items like sandbags to enter Gaza even though more than 300,000 tents are needed immediately, along with thousands of pallets of supplies essential for life.

Israel’s ceasefire obligations include allowing the unchecked flow of aid into Gaza. It is an obligation that it has never implemented, instead opting to allow only a trickle and expressing its entitlement to strangle the flow even further if it chooses.

Israel has never ceased bombing and shooting Palestinians in Gaza throughout since the supposed ceasefire went into force in October this year. Despite this, the British media continue to talk about the ceasefire being “under pressure” or “tested,” as if it is just holding in spite of Israel, the occupying force, putting it in danger.

Only last weekend even Channel 4 News, hardly one of the worst offenders, was using the same language, telling UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese that “phase one of the ceasefire is holding, but it’s precarious.”

Albanese, an expert in international law and human rights, immediately and rightly shut that point down, pointing out to her interviewer: “The ceasefire is not precarious, its not existent. Since the day the ceasefire was proclaimed nearly 400 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza.”

In the same way, the Israeli military has never allowed in anywhere near the amount of aid it was supposed to — in fact, less than a quarter of that has entered the Strip, to condemnation from the United Nations general assembly that is likely to remain impotent as long as the US, Britain and other UN security council members continue to collaborate with the occupation.

The situation with shelters and building materials is even worse. The UN’s humanitarian affairs office has reported that “23 requests from nine aid agencies to bring in nearly 4,000 pallets of urgently needed shelter supplies into Gaza” have been “rejected by the Israeli authorities.” This situation has been so disastrous that even the usually silent Starmer government has been forced to condemn it after more than a thousand British-supplied tents took more than a year to reach Gaza because of Israeli blocks.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) added that in “[t]wo months since the ceasefire, only a trickle of shelter supplies has entered Gaza. Due to severe restrictions, UN and international aid organisations have only been able to bring in 15,600 tents for 88,000 people, while 1.29 million still need shelter to survive the winter.”
 
Israel is also blocking the most basic items that might allow tents to be repaired or makeshift shelters to be rigged by desperate Palestinians. Save the Children said last week that Israel has put a complete ban on the entry of tent poles, timber and tools into Gaza and is heavily restricting supplies of shoes, winter clothes and blankets that might help Palestinians, and especially their children, survive the harsh winter. The charity added that Israel has not allowed it to take any of its own supplies into the territory for nine months.

None of this is accidental, or a mere by-product of Israel’s callousness or racism, nor even just a consequence of the latest floods. Instead, Israel has “engineered” starvation, disease and exposure in Gaza throughout the genocide.

A new investigation by independent Egyptian media outlet Mada Masr has exposed how even during periods in the genocide when it allowed aid into Gaza, Israel — in collusion with Egyptian and Palestinian collaborators — rigged the supply system to ensure that food prices meant that Palestinian civilians could afford only basic subsistence at best.

After the latest “ceasefire,” they claim, Israeli-funded criminal gangs continued to steal food and other essentials from Palestinians and prevent aid trucks reaching those who needed them, until their leader Abu Shabab was killed in an ambush earlier this month.

GDP per capita in Gaza is now $161. One hundred and sixty-one dollars per person per year. Among the lowest on Earth. The entire population of Gaza now lives below the poverty line. Not most of them. All of them. Every single person.

By August 2025, a Lancet study revealed that nearly 55,000 children under six years old in Gaza suffer from acute malnutrition. More than 12,800 of them are so severely malnourished that medical experts say they have “little chance of rehabilitation.” These are children whose bodies are shutting down. Children whose organ systems are failing.

A panellist on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 stated on December 11, 2025, that “I don’t think there will be a single tent left in place on Friday morning” and “I don’t have a problem that people will not be there either,” characterising the storm that was killing Palestinian families as a “clean-up” and describing it as “God gave them the punishment, and now he’s cleaning the Strip with the water a bit.”

Israeli human rights lawyer Itay Epshtain, now working for the Norwegian Refugee Council, has no doubt whatever that Israel’s blocking of shelter from Gaza is entirely intentional and entirely criminal. In a post on his Instagram page, Epshtain wrote: “Malicious Israeli obstruction of relief to Gaza, including critical shelter winterisation, is in breach of International humanitarian law as determined by the ICJ in the October ’25 Advisory Opinion.”

I would argue that this structural violence and settler colonialism through elimination is a continuation of Israel’s genocide of Gaza.

Israel is following the example of armies from ancient history in encircling a civilian population and leaving it to starve while it turns its attention to other direct military conquests. Netanyahu makes no secret of his plan for a “greater Israel” encompassing Lebanon and Syria and ultimately even Iran and Iraq; while his forces rest and refit from all-out war on Gaza and keep the Strip isolated, they have repeatedly attacked, then seized territory in, Lebanon and Syria in recent weeks, bombed Iraq and continue to threaten Iran while Israel and its proxies try again to manoeuvre the US into direct action against the Iranians by claiming they are backing supposed terror plans in the US and Europe.

Israel could not do this alone. The United States supplies the weapons. F-16s. Apache helicopters. Precision-guided munitions. The entire military apparatus of Israel is underwritten by the US military-industrial complex. Britain sits in the security council and abstains from protective votes. Britain speaks of “humanitarian concerns” while supplying military components to Israel.

This is global imperialism at work. The entire Western imperial apparatus permits Gaza’s annihilation through a calculated combination of military provision, diplomatic protection, and rhetorical concern divorced from material action.

When Storm Byron hit Gaza this week, the state director of the Health Ministry called it “the fourth catastrophe.” Death. Displacement. A futureless exile. And now winter.

But winter isn’t really the fourth catastrophe. It’s the inevitable conclusion of the first three. When you bomb every hospital, when you destroy every home, when you starve an entire population, when you block every aid truck — of course the winter will kill people. Of course, a storm will overwhelm people living in plastic tents. Of course, babies will freeze. The weather is not the weapon. The blockade is the weapon. The bombs are the weapon. The starvation is the weapon.

What is happening in Gaza right now is that the temperature is dropping. More storms are forecast. More families will huddle in tents that cannot keep out rain or wind. More children will face conditions their bodies cannot survive.

The Israeli state knows this. Every meteorologist on Earth knew Storm Byron was coming. And yet the blockade continued. The aid remains blocked. The tents remain barred from entry. Israel’s decision to maintain the blockade despite foreknowledge of lethal weather conditions constitutes what international law defines as a deliberate infliction of “conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.” This meets the legal definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention.

Francesca Albanese is right: the genocide has never stopped or even paused. Instead, Israel has simply switched weapons and tactics. It is now using the winter weather and disease to continue its genocide during the “ceasefire,” freeing up its arms and resources to advance its territorial ambitions against other neighbours while the Palestinians and especially their children freeze, drown and continue to starve.

It would be my argument that capitalism is in crisis, it is now extracting value through predatory seizure of existing assets from what it deems to be the weak and dispossessed.

What is required is revolution. Not metaphorically. Concretely.

Economic disruption. Mass strikes. International co-ordination across borders and classes. The building of parallel institutions of power that do not ask permission from empire. The explicit rejection of imperialism in all its forms.

Benjamin Netanyahu must face international justice. The blockade of Gaza must end. Palestinian refugees must return. Palestinian territories must be fully sovereign. And the entire architecture of imperialism that permits genocide against the weak must be dismantled.

The dead in Gaza cannot wait for us to become comfortable with revolution. They cannot wait for capitalism to evolve into something kinder. They cannot wait.

So, we act. We act because the alternative is complicity in genocide. The people of Gaza are fighting for their lives. For their dignity. For their right to exist on their land. We can do nothing less than show solidarity alongside them with everything we have.

Claudia Webbe was previously the British member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.