DEIR AL-BALAH: Aisha Al-Zain heard the news between the sunset and evening prayers on Sunday. People were shouting that a tent had fallen on Tahrir and her children.

Then came the names, one by one. Habiba. Salah. Mariam. Tahrir. Ibrahim. Reem.

She ran out barefoot, her head uncovered. Where the tents of her niece Tahrir and her daughter-in-law Reem had stood, there was only a hill of sand.

"I found a mountain on top of Tahrir and her children, and on Reem and her children," she told Arab News.

After a day of heavy rain, a sand embankment had given way onto tents sheltering displaced families south of Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. At least five people were killed, three of them children, Gaza's civil defence said.

It struck during Gaza's first winter storm, which flooded at least 70,000 tents within 12 hours, according to the Gaza government media office. Mahmoud Basal, the civil defence spokesperson, told Arab News his crews had received more than 1,500 calls for help in a few hours, without the tools to answer them all. Israel, he said, had destroyed the pumps his teams use to drain flooded tents.

"The bigger disaster is what lies ahead," he warned.

A ceasefire has held since October 2025. Israel's aid coordination body, COGAT, says more than 91,000 tents have entered Gaza under its winter plan, and that some equipment stays out because Hamas could use it. Save the Children told Arab News that Israeli authorities had not let enough tents through.

For the two sisters, the road to that hillside began in Jabalia, in northern Gaza. Tahrir and Reem fled south with their children about a year and a half ago, said their brother, Ibrahim Eid, and had lived ever since in a camp east of Deir al-Balah.

On Sunday night, with no warning, the sand came down and buried everyone inside.

Tahrir died instantly, along with her daughter, Mariam Nabhan. So did Reem's daughter, Habiba Al-Zain, a girl who had already lost her father. He was killed on Dec. 20, 2023, during the first Israeli incursion into Jabalia, the family said.

Reem is in a serious condition in intensive care at Nasser Hospital. Her son Ibrahim lies in intensive care at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Eid blames the occupation for driving families into remote, harsh places, and Arab nations for letting down Gaza's children.

Al-Zain's tent stood so close to theirs that only a single strip of cloth separated them. Two of her grandchildren are alive only because they were elsewhere that evening: a boy who had stayed in town, and a girl who had gone to the shop.

Umm Salah, her brother's daughter, was four or five months pregnant, she said.

In three years of war, the family has been forced to move eight times. "Not one, not two. Eight times," Al-Zain said.

She believes years of bombardment cracked the hillside long before the rain finished it. Now she asks only for patience, and for the war to end.

"Death follows us in every form," Eid said. "We don't know how we will die: by shelling, by homes collapsing, and now by collapsing sand."

What remains, he said, is to hope that this blood marks the end of the road.