When the Cold Comes: Winter Shelter for Families Who Lost Everything

The first rain of winter finds every hole in a tent. Umm Yousef learned this the night water pooled under her sleeping children and there was nowhere drier to move them. Her house is rubble. The tent was all she had.

For tens of thousands of families in Gaza, winter is not a season — it is an emergency with a start date. Temperatures drop, rains flood the camps, and children who survived the war face pneumonia, hypothermia, and nights too cold to sleep.

What a shelter kit actually contains

Motaz Foundation's winterization program is deliberately unglamorous, because survival is practical. A family shelter kit includes reinforced tarpaulins to seal leaking tents, thermal blankets and mattresses to lift families off the wet ground, warm children's clothing, and safe heating fuel.

Distribution teams — working with UNRWA USA and IBC — go camp by camp before the worst weather arrives, prioritizing families in makeshift shelters, households headed by widows, and families with infants.

The night after the kit came, my children slept until morning. I sat awake just to watch them sleep warm.

— Umm Yousef, mother of four

From tents to something more

Emergency shelter is the first step, not the last. Where materials and permissions allow, our teams help families repair damaged rooms in their original homes — a sealed roof, a rebuilt wall, a door that closes. One dry room in a family's own home is worth more than any tent.

A $120 donation equips a family with a full emergency shelter kit. Winter is coming either way — whether a family faces it warm or cold is something you can decide.