Hamas says floods swamped 70,000 Gaza tents as aid stalls

Floods tore through Gaza's displacement camps over the weekend, and Hamas says the toll on shelters is staggering. The group's press office reported Saturday that 70,000 tents across refugee camps were flooded within a 12-hour stretch, leaving already displaced families without cover.

Hamas pegged the material damage from the flooding at roughly $3 million. The figure comes from the group's own press office and has not been independently confirmed.

In the same statement, Hamas accused Israel of refusing to let necessary equipment and humanitarian aid cross into the strip — a charge that, if accurate, would hamper any emergency response to the flooding. Israel has not publicly responded to that allegation.

The warning lands at a delicate moment. A US-brokered ceasefire is meant to be holding, yet Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem said earlier this month that Israeli forces were still striking civilians, describing Gaza's streets as 'corridors of death' and urging the US-led Board of Peace to step in.

Diplomatic traffic has picked up in parallel. Israel's President Isaac Herzog met with Board of Peace senior envoy Tony Blair in Jerusalem, according to the Times of Israel, with Blair pushing a 20-point plan to end the war and a newer 15-point roadmap to disarm Hamas. Board of Peace High Representative for Gaza Nickolay Mladenov also visited Israel, per the same outlet.

For the families in those camps, the politics are secondary to the water. Seventy thousand soaked tents and a multi-million-dollar cleanup bill, with the machinery to fix it — by Hamas's account — still stuck at the border.