In the ruins of a bombed-out house in Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood, western Gaza City, Umm Kamal fans her feverish child with a damp cloth.
"No water, no electricity, no food... and now the heat," the 37-year-old mother of five told The New Arab, her voice barely audible.
Across the war-torn coastal enclave, a blistering heatwave is compounding a humanitarian catastrophe, amplifying the suffering of more than two million Palestinians already reeling from war, siege, and deprivation by Israel.
Scorching temperatures meet starvation and thirst
Temperatures have surged past 40°C, turning tents, shelters, and destroyed homes into furnaces.
With electricity absent for more than 21 months, air conditioning and fans are now relics of a different life. For hundreds of thousands of displaced residents, the heat isn't merely uncomfortable; it's lethal.
In a makeshift tent camp in Gaza City, 45-year-old Halima Baraka told TNA her family is barely surviving.
"Our tent is an oven. The children cry all day. We use drinking water to cool them, but it vanishes in seconds," she said. Her infant son has a fever, but she fears seeking medical care.
"The roads are dangerous. Even if we reach a hospital, there may be no help," she lamented.
With the siege deepening, Israel has blocked fuel, food convoys, and commercial crossings.
According to field doctors, the combination of heat and hunger is overwhelming. Fidaa al-Najjar, who runs a small clinic in Gaza City, told TNA, "We're seeing increasing cases of unconscious children and pregnant women. Malnutrition has weakened them, and the heat is speeding up their deterioration. We lack medicine, cooling, everything."
Water, too, is increasingly scarce. Airstrikes and fuel shortages have destroyed much of Gaza's fragile water infrastructure.
Engineer Raed Abu al-Atta of Gaza City's Water Department said over 60 percent of the wells have been hit.
"Desalination plants are idle. Even the little drinking water that used to arrive from Israel has been cut. People now rely on dirty groundwater or even seawater," he told TNA.
According to the WHO, more than 70 percent of Gaza's population lacks access to safe drinking water.
As a result, long lines of children can be seen waiting for hours at broken water tanks. In many areas, families walk miles under the blazing sun to fetch just a few litres of murky water.
Food insecurity has turned into a hunger emergency. Once dependent on food aid and imports, Gaza now faces a near-total collapse of the food supply chain.
The World Food Programme estimates that over 90 percent of Gazans are food insecure, with many going entire days without eating.
In Zeitoun, Gaza City, Khalil Ayyad stood by the rubble of his destroyed home, now covered by a makeshift tent.
"We haven’t eaten since yesterday, no bread, no rice, nothing. When aid trucks come, it’s chaos. People fight over spoiled cans," he told TNA.
His youngest son, emaciated and barely standing, needs protein, but they survive on tea and dry bread when they find it.
"We opened a tin of beans last week. It smelled like rust," he said. "With no refrigeration, even donated food spoils rapidly under the heat."
Across Gaza, families echo the same grim refrain, one meal a day, sometimes less. The heatwave accelerates food spoilage, and children are visibly wasting away.
At emergency food stations, staff say people now line up for hours just to receive expired bread or a scoop of lentils.
Heatwave pushes limits of healthcare
Gaza's healthcare system, battered by war and crippled by shortages, is unravelling under the added weight of the heatwave.
Clinics and field hospitals report an uptick in dehydration, skin infections, and heatstroke, especially among children and the elderly.
At Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, a city in the centre of the Gaza Strip, Khalil al-Diqran, the hospital's spokesman, described worsening conditions.
"We see dozens daily, some collapse in the waiting room. We have no fans, no cooling, and some staff members have fainted from the heat," he told TNA.
"Power outages mean vital machines, such as incubators, dialysis units, and refrigerators for medicine, have stopped functioning. Without diesel, hospitals cannot sterilise instruments or keep drugs viable. Medicines requiring cooling have spoiled, and patients with chronic illnesses are dying at home without care," he said.
Humanitarian agencies, including UNRWA and Médecins sans frontières, are calling the situation "a perfect storm of suffering," urging the international community to press Israel to allow fuel and aid deliveries.
But Kerem Shalom and other crossings remain tightly restricted. Aid trucks are often delayed or blocked, and many suspects that deepening civilian suffering is being used as political leverage.
As Gaza bakes under the relentless sun, the world remains silent.