endure

The Israeli military has killed at least three Palestinians in Gaza, as the coastal enclave reeled from heavy rains flooding shoddy makeshift tents housing thousands who have been denied adequate shelter owing to Israel’s continued throttling of aid supplies.

A source at Nasser Medical Complex told Al Jazeera on Sunday that three people had been killed after Israel bombed east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. That same day, Israel also struck Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood and areas close to the southern city of Rafah.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili said the Israeli army was still targeting locations inside the so-called yellow line, which demarcates where troops have withdrawn as part of the ceasefire.

Al-Khalili said the situation was “going from bad to worse” for families living near the yellow line, as the military continued to “demolish residential buildings” and “spread panic” while they contended with heavy rains flooding makeshift shelters.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that 13,000 families in Gaza whose homes were destroyed during two years of indiscriminate Israeli bombardment are now exposed to freezing temperatures and flooding in woefully inadequate shelters.

UN data shows that more than 80 percent of all buildings and housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the war. But Israel continues to block the entry of tents and mobile homes into the enclave despite the ceasefire, which was meant to unleash a flow of aid to stricken residents.

Tamara Alrifai, UNRWA’s director of communications, said Israel had placed limitations on what could enter the enclave, banning certain items deemed to be of dual use that could potentially be used for military purposes. “Israel … would take out many items that are extremely needed, especially in this winter situation,” she said.

“UNRWA is under double the amount of scrutiny and restrictions than other agencies despite being the largest agency there,” Alrifai said, adding that the UN agency has enough supplies to fill 6,000 aid trucks from its warehouses in Egypt and Jordan.

‘Submerged’

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said: “It’s been raining for two days and people are telling us that everything has started to leak. Many of these displacement camps are at a different elevation to surrounding areas, allowing water to run in from all sides. Some areas are completely submerged.”

“For people sheltering inside bombed-out buildings, everything is leaking, and there is a risk that with the heavy rains, the buildings could collapse. People who set up tents near the coast are at risk of strong tides washing away their tents,” he said.

Abdulrahman Asaliyah, a displaced Palestinian in the city, told Al Jazeera: “All the tents have been flooded, people’s mattresses, their food, their water, their clothes. Everything has been soaked. We are calling for help for new tents that can at least protect people from the winter cold.”

Caroline Seguin, Gaza emergency coordinator at Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF), said that many people were awakened by the floods and were afraid to go back to sleep. “In Gaza, it is a luxury to spend the night in a dry place,” she told Al Jazeera.

Seguin said Israel was still putting up barriers to much-needed aid entering the enclave. Bringing in supplies, including tents and medication, was still “very complicated”, she said, requiring “even more administrative processes” from the Israeli side.

Netanyahu unsure about truce duration

Since the start of the ceasefire agreement last month, at least 266 people have been killed and 635 wounded by Israeli attacks, adding to a grim toll now approaching 70,000 deaths.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that he did not know how long the Gaza ceasefire would hold, adding that Israel was still expecting the remains of three captives to be returned by Hamas.

Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has been undertaking efforts with the Red Cross to locate the remains of captives under mountains of rubble left behind by Israeli bombardment.

Netanyahu also said that his opposition to a Palestinian state had “not changed one bit”, one day before the UN Security Council votes on a United States-drafted resolution mentioning a “credible pathway” to Palestinian statehood that would mandate an international stabilisation force in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank continued unabated, with raids on two camps that left two young Palestinians dead.

Soldiers shot Jadallah Jihad Jumaa Jadallah, a 15-year-old ninth-grade student, as they raided the Far’a camp, located south of the city of Tubas in the West Bank, preventing paramedics from assisting him, according to Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Separately, the military also killed Hassan Sharkasi during a raid on the Askar refugee camp east of Nablus, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Ukraine says European allies can give up some of their Patriot missile systems now and get future deliveries.

Most regions of Ukraine are undergoing scheduled power outages amid a new wave of attacks on energy sites by Russian drones and missiles.

Ukrenergo, the state-run electricity transmission systems operator in Ukraine, said the blackouts will last at least until the end of Monday as repairs are conducted on infrastructure damaged over the weekend and demand remains high as the onset of winter approaches.

The Poltava and Kharkiv regions are suffering from a deficit of high-voltage capacity after damage to their power transmission lines while the areas of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kyiv and other central and northern regions have been affected as well.

According to Ukraine’s military, Russian forces used two air-launched ballistic missiles, five surface-to-air guided missiles and 67 drones, including those of Iranian design, during their attacks overnight into Monday.

The Ukrainian army did not report shooting down any of the missiles, but it said 52 of the drones were intercepted and the remaining 15 conducted strikes on nine locations.

Russia has maintained its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as United States-led diplomatic efforts to end the war make little progress. Ukraine has also been hitting Russian oil and fuel infrastructure in a stated effort to disrupt resources going to the front lines.

An explosion rocked Russia’s port town of Tuapse on the Black Sea overnight after Ukrainian forces launched sea drones towards the major oil terminal and refinery in the town. No casualties were reported.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced on Monday that four naval drones were destroyed near the port in the northeastern Black Sea.

It added that its air defences shot down six US-made HIMARS rockets and 124 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles.

Ukraine wants Patriots from Europe

While calling for tougher sanctions and asset freezes to punish Russia, Ukraine is also looking to buy more arms.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that Ukraine would like to order 25 Patriot air defence systems from US weapons makers as it tries to fend off Russian attacks at the brink of winter.

Zelenskyy acknowledged that the missile systems are expensive and such a large order could take years to manufacture. But he suggested that European countries could give their Patriots to Ukraine and await replacements, stressing that “we would not like to wait.”

Ukraine is also advancing with an internal drive with a stated aim of weeding out corruption in the energy sector.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau announced on Monday that it was conducting searches in cooperation with a specialised anticorruption judicial office in premises connected to Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of the president.

Mindich, who reportedly fled before the searches, is coowner of Zelenskyy’s Kvartal 95 production company. The Anti-Corruption Bureau said the searches are in relation to a “high-level criminal organisation in the energy and defence sectors” that engaged in money laundering and illegal enrichment.