Hassan Herzallah is a translator, writer and storyteller from Gaza. He collaborates with several international newspapers. For the "Water for Gaza" campaign, he chose to share with Un Ponte Per his direct testimonydocumenting his life under siege and displacement. She is in her third year of studies in English translation at the Islamic University of Gaza and continued her education online after the university was bombed.

Gaza, 9 December 2025

I woke up before sunrise, the way I’ve learned to wake up two years. The tent was cold, and my hands were stiff as I tried to start a small fire to heat some water for taking shower. Winter had arrived silently this year—without warning, without mercy. The ceasefire had changed nothing.

My mother asked me again this morning, “Where will we go before the first rain begins?”

I didn’t answer. I looked at our tent—eight months old, thin, torn at the edges—and I knew she already understood.

Later that afternoon, I walked through a street in Khan Younis that I recognized from before the genocide. I used to go past this street by bus on my way to university, but now it was just ruins. The silence there is different… it’s the silence of places that no longer remember themselves.

I were searching for an apartment to survive the winter, but every place we entered felt like a reminder of what we lost. Some apartments were half destroyed, some too dangerous, some impossibly expensive. I kept walking, but inside I felt stuck between the weight of memories and the reality of the tent that awaited me.

That evening, I met two children from the camp—Adam, nine, and his little sister Bisan. They were using their hands to try to pile sand around the edges of their tent. I saw them as I walked by and gave them a shovel to help lift the sand more easily. Their little hands were red from the cold of the night and the chill of the sand.

Then Adam looked at me and said, “If it rains, our tent becomes a boat.” I didn’t know what to say. Sometimes silence is the only honest answer we have.

That night, on November 20, 2025, everything changed in just seventeen minutes.

There was no electricity in the camp. Everyone was already sleeping. I had just closed my eyes when I heard the first drop hit the tent roof. Then another. And another. My little brother Mohammad shouted, “Hassan, the water is coming in!” I jumped up.

The rain wasn’t rain—it was a storm. Water poured through the holes in the tent faster than we could stop it. My sisters Malak and Alaa tried to lift our blankets off the floor, while I pressed my bag against the largest tear in the roof, and my father was battling the flood in the other tent.

Outside, people were shouting. I heard Abu Adam shouting as water filled his tent and he wasn't know what to do. My friend Wasem was trying to carry his disabled brother to higher ground. I saw a little girl—barefoot—running behind her mother, holding a pot to catch the water falling on their belongs.

In the midst of it all, while I was trying to keep water out of our old tent, my young cousin Yosuf—an orphan—came running to me, his face pale with fear. “Come quickly… Our tent is flooded,” he said, referring to himself and his five sisters, who could not manage the flooding on their own. I felt torn between staying to protect our tent and going to help them, but my feet moved on their own toward their area.

When I arrived, I was shocked. All their belongings were almost ruined, soaked completely. Their small, modest kitchen was flooded. I tried to help them remove the water as much as I could, whispering in my head, “Please, Allah, let the rain stop.”

Those few minutes were enough to expose our weakness and helplessness in the first storm of our third winter of ongoing suffering. No one was sitting idly by—big or small, child, woman, or young man—everyone was struggling, fighting, and enduring.

Seventeen minutes.

That’s how long the rain lasted.

Seventeen minutes were enough to flood hundreds of tents. Enough to turn a quiet night into chaos. Enough to remind us that even after the ceasefire, survival is still a daily battle.

When the rain finally stopped, the cold became sharper. I sat awake for hours, waiting for another leak, another sound, another disaster. By dawn my body felt frozen, heavy with exhaustion, but I forced myself to write these lines—to remember, to record, to say that we are still here .

In the morning, I woke up to flooded streets. Water had nowhere to drain because of the lack of infrastructure, and a little boy was wading through the water in the street while we couldn’t move anywhere.

I used to love winter in Gaza. It was one of the most beautiful seasons of the year. Inside our homes, the air was warm, family gatherings were frequent, and children ran outside to play in the rain. Adults would sit by the windows, listening to the soothing sound of the falling water—a feeling unlike any other season.

But today, after more than two years of war, and even after the ceasefire “on paper,” everything has changed. We are now entering our third winter with no real solution in sight. Our tattered tents have become our only shelter, flooded from every side by rain and wind. Winter has become a season everyone fears, a witness to the suffering of Gaza’s people.

Yet, the dream of a normal life still lingers in my mind, even as the future remains uncertain. Once again, winter reminds us that Gaza continues to endure in silence, caught between the pain of the past and the uncertainty of what is to come.

Hassan Herzallah - Correspondent from Gaza