"Death follows us in every form": in Gaza, now the sand kills

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.