Heavy winter rains have lashed Gaza, washing out tents and flooding some areas, as the head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees described deteriorating conditions in the coastal strip as a “living hell”. Amid escalating shortages of food, spreading waves of communicable disease and the near collapse of Gaza’s health system, the winter storm turned large areas to mud and drenched many of those sleeping in makeshift plastic tents. Separately, Israel announced it had lost nine soldiers including two senior commanders and several other officers in a Hamas ambush in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shejaiya amid continued heavy fighting across Gaza. The rapidly worsening humanitarian situation comes as Israel’s air and ground war – after the attack by Hamas on 7 October – has pushed nearly 85% of Gaza’s population from their homes. Among those caught in the open was Ameen Edwan, camped with thousands of others in the grounds of al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza, who said his family had been unable to sleep. “Rainwater seeped in. We couldn’t sleep. We tried to find nylon covers but couldn’t find any so we resorted to stones and sand” to keep the rain out, he told the AFP news agency. At a tent camp in Rafah, located on sandy terrain strewn with rubbish, people were trying to recover from a horrible night, carrying buckets of sand to cover puddles inside or just outside their tents, and hanging up soggy clothes. Some families have proper tents but others are making do with tarpaulins or thin, see-through plastic made to protect goods rather than to provide shelter for people. Many tents have no groundsheets, so people spent the night huddling on wet sand. “[The tent] is torn and water poured on us. We were drenched,” said Ramadan Mohadad, a middle-aged man who was trying to fix his family’s shelter fashioned from strips of plywood and a thin plastic sheet. Mohadad’s white T-shirt with stripes had large wet patches around the collar and on both shoulders. “We tried as much as we could to protect ourselves so water would not get through but rain got in … This plastic does not protect people sleeping under it,” he said. Rips were visible in other families’ plastic shelters, and some showed puddles inside. One family had placed a cement block at the entrance to act as a sort of dam, as well as smaller bricks inside that looked like stepping stones.